Wednesday, January 31, 2007

You Want Innovation? Offer a Prize


An excellent Economix article on innovation, prizes and why "Wizard of Oz" is like "Silence of the Lambs".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

competition is the best way to find fast and more cost efficient ways of doing things. cause it is human nature to be competitive and want to be the best. if you made everything into a contest then people would strive more just so they could be the best and work harder to further what they are working on.

Anonymous said...

It does make good economic sense to offer rewards for innovation. Human nature makes it unrealistic to assume that individuals will seek progress for the good of everyone. People are greedy and need incentive. This capitalist philosophy is why america's industry was and is able to grow so fast. As capitalists, we place a great importance on patent laws, which creates incentive for innovation. Take the example of medical companies. The government grants the legal monopolies over whatever drug they discover. People complain that thia lets drug companies charge whatever they want. But the reality is that without this big payoff at the end, companies would never have done the research to make the breakthrough in the first place. The reward of having exclusive rights to a product is incentive for innovation. Its bette rto have expensive aids medicine than no aids medicine at all.