Well gee, if only we had some sort of previous experience with a way to fund long-term research in basic sciences, the results of which profoundly changed our world.<p>Oh wait, we've spent the last 30 years enjoying the fruits of government funded research from NASA, DARPA, Bell Labs, and others. I know that this may not be popular with some people on Hacker News, but by and large government funded research in the basic sciences has been instrumental in transforming America into the technological powerhouse it currently is.<p>Peter Thiel is upset we have 140 characters, and not flying cars? I choose to be blown away that we have a world wide planetary communication grid capable of delivering information in near real-time. Step back for a moment and let that blow you away for a while.<p>I appreciate the enormous advances that industry has layered on top of the many breakthroughs that have come from public labs, and I also understand that industry has been invaluable in making many of these breakthroughs popular and widespread.<p>But we already have a model for successful R&D that will allow for the sort of paradigm shifts that Thiel is apparently asking for, and it's not going to come from a decade of eating ramen in your garage, hoping that you'll finally get your payoff in the form of an X-Prize. It comes from consistent government funding towards the best and brightest, not beholden to quarterly results or the profit motive, from dedicated researchers each doing their part to move things a step forward.<p>If you really want breakthroughs that will change the world, then it has to come with the patience to wait years or decades, to keep funding steady and high enough that the best aren't impoverished, and the understanding that the results need to be open and free to all who want them.
Generally, I like this idea, but it will be interesting to see how it pans out. My sense is that innovation prizes are mostly the whims of the wealthy - they are the modern equivalent of patronage. Performance-based patronage with a dash of magnanimity. Crowd-funded innovation prizes will probably not have an iconoclast to give the enterprise focus and visibility. That's not deadly, though: it's easy to imagine a crowd-funding site which solicits two things, money from ordinary people and endorsements from celebrities. You know, Paris Hilton's smiling face encouraging you to give $20 to the Singularity Prize.<p>And while I like the performance-based approach, unlike patronage this places a great deal of risk on the shoulders of the innovators. If they are independently wealthy, no problem. But most scientists aren't. Which means they'll need to get funded, which means dealing with capital. Now VCs are already, quite directly, in the research game. But even $10M prizes are small. Indeed, a $100M prize might be too small if there are many competitors and the challenge takes years. These prizes would have to be a lot bigger to compete with the kinds of payouts startups can yield.<p>Or perhaps the idea is that people compete while they are not doing anything at their day job at the Swiss patent office?
Innovation prizes? I could not disagree more.<p>If you've seen the excellent RSA animate talk "Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"[1] you'll see that it's quite the opposite. When it comes to mentally challenging tasks, people want autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Just pay them enough to take the issue of money off the table.<p>Personally, that really agrees with me. My ideal situation is to be funded via a sustainable crowd-sourced funding like Gittip, so that I can continue doing what I'm doing now: _not_ working at a deadend business that's only concerned about making a profit, where I hate working for my boss. Instead, I want to[2] create amazing software tools that make our world a better place to live. I really enjoy software development and want to make it better, funner, more efficient. I don't care about money beyond just making enough to pay for rent and food. Money and food are just in my way, stealing away from the time I could be working.<p>Thankfully, I still have some savings that'll last me maybe half a year before I do have to find a way to make a living again. But really, I want to keep this up.<p>My current life: wake up each morning, absolutely free of any commitments, and think to myself: what cool things can I do today to make the world better?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc#t=294s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc#t=294s</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/shurcooL" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/shurcooL</a>
Innovation prizes have a good track record so far, and do seem to act as a lever in a real sense.<p>There is a troublesome user experience in any crowd funded innovation prize though - most prizes will take a long time to pay out, or will never pay out at all. For the first several years your user experience will be, "Well, I've committed 100 dollars to 3 projects, but nothing has happened yet." Kickstarter projects can take years but at least they clearly march towards a ship date.<p>Any endeavor here will need to have a mix of big and small projects, and will also need to find ways to show feel-good incremental progress from the more ambitious prize pools.
Counter-points: Flying cars (bombs) are a dumb idea, the infrastructure to support globally broadcast 140 char messages is nothing short of amazing, and innovation is alive and well despite the financial service industries sucking up America's brightest minds : <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/04/talent_and_banks" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/04/talent_and...</a>
My problem with the X-Prize concept is the also the strength of the X-Prize concept -- the magnitude of the goal.<p>For something like an "X-Prize for Everything" to be truly be a successful there have to be goals that are reachable at all size levels. So instead of just a grand goal, there could be smaller goals, that are published, have awards, and all of it should be open sourced/licensed.<p>There was research on a wiki-like programming contest that I think demonstrates how important solving both the big and small aspects is, and one contest implementation to address both[1]. Because of the "winner take all" approach, I don't think it's a good way to solve grand goal challenges (i.e. it financially punishes losers).<p>But something like a VCS that can show contributors to a winning solution. Or a crowdfunded site where even small goal challenges can be posted, this could obviously include micro-goal challenges of grand challenges (e.g., a team trying to win a "human cloning" contest could post a "human eye cloning" contest).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.starchamber.com/gulley/pubs/tweaking/tweaking.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.starchamber.com/gulley/pubs/tweaking/tweaking.htm...</a>
We, as entrepreneurs, are so obsessed with creating the next "photo sharing app" when there are some real, hard problems to be solved. Maybe its the daily dose of blogs incessantly hyping over such ideas, but we might just have lost sight of the big picture. I speak for myself, but entrepreneurship should be about more than just this.
In response to this article I say it should be more than opting in, personally I think it should be a requirement.<p>His vision is clear, my vision, I'm sure shared by many, will come true when companies are able to opt in giving a percentage of their profits towards innovation funds like the one suggested, local civic engineering / hacking funds to become an incentive for cross sector collaboration in opening data from the government and other beneficial entities, and funds for programs like STEM, FIRST, and NASA or their choice of other NPOs or even NGOs.<p>All of this on top of receiving a deduction for doing so in their taxes can drive innovation on a whole new level. Somewhat allowing a a post-benefit company-like[0] incorporation in all states might lead to this.<p>Who will NOT opt into this for at least 5 years?<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation</a>
There are some problems with prizes like the hard-to-avoid arbitrary nature of the rules and winner-gets-all problems which make big projects risky - you can't get a loan from the bank for building a project for a competition.<p>But patents and traditional innovation where you have to found a company and try to market your stuff might be even worse than that - I think most technical people don't like the idea of creating their own company. It might be easier to just open source your project.<p>I've been thinking about open sourcing some of my (hardware) ideas. It doesn't seem likely I'd ever create a company and start wasting my time in the pursuit of unlikely success. I'm not a crazy risk seeking optimistic person.
Quite a lot of the problem is how we get paid for things on the web. Advertising as the driver limits the scope of what you can do since you need to have anchor for the ads. Micropayments have never really panned out as the fees are still prohibitive[1].<p>Kickstarter seems to be this in reverse. I come up with an idea and people fund it based on their desire. Instead of rich patron, I have many "poor"[2] patrons. A weekly video program on Kickstarters would drive more than big money prizes.<p>1) I have seen quite a few grocery stores now putting up the "minimum credit car purchase $10 due to rising fees".<p>2) poor in the money contributed sense, not a commentary on their personal finances
Want to kickstart a century of unparalleled innovation and entrepreneurship in the US?<p>Simple. But you have to cleanup the mess first.<p>In other words, throw out all that is mismanaged, inefficient and abused and replace it with an infrastructure fine-tuned to iterate to optimize growth and innovation.<p>This means making changes to government, workforce and taxation.<p>Here's my (incomplete) list:<p><pre><code> - Pass a constitutional amendment that requires our
government to operate under a balanced budget
- Establish a maximum cost of government as a percent of
GDP (or some other metric) in order to prevent a grab
for more tax revenue to expand government and the
pervasive always-spend-more culture
- Reduce government to a bare minimum
- Completely phase out all entitlement programs
- Institute new --smaller-- programs to help those who
really need them.
- All businesses contribute a small percentage of gross
to this program (1%?). The idea is to setup a system
where government will have reason to work towards
improving business activity in order to fund programs.
Today they reach for optimizing tax revenues as
opposed to optimizing economic activity which is far
more important.
- Make unions illegal for government workers.
It's a huge conflict of interest: Government workers
benefit from laws and the workings of government and
form a unified voting block that is self-serving.
- No lifetime pensions for anyone working in government.
I'd go as far as making them illegal for anyone, period.
There is no sensible mathematical formula that supports
the idea of lifetime pensions. A person and their family
ought to be responsible for their own retirement without
becoming a burden for the rest of society for generations
to come.
These are business killers.
- Fire everyone at the patent office
- Create a new patent and trademark system who's priority
is to optimize to maximize innovation while
providing reasonable protections for work that requires
massive R&D
- Flat and low taxes
- No deductions for anyone
- Businesses pay zero taxes
- Businesses contribute 5% of their gross to a national
R&D fund
- The fund is NOT accessible to anyone in government
- The fund is administered by a team of CEO's from various
industries. There could be other layers too. The main
point is: No government claws can reach this fund.
- The fund's goal is to provide financial support, legal
and operational guidance to entrepreneurs. Call it a
mega-incubator</code></pre>
Thiel's coming off a bit hypocritical. What was innovative about PayPal? Facebook? Apparently there was enough innovation there for Thiel to invest his time and money.<p>I think to non-technical people there is nothing innovative about Twitter, Facebook and most of online services offered today. To techies innovation is in the infrastructures these services are built on & sometimes made publicly available to others (ie Amazon).
On a similar theme: "Voted Compensation" - <a href="http://thinkinghard.com/ip/PublicGood.html" rel="nofollow">http://thinkinghard.com/ip/PublicGood.html</a><p>Basically, a government/taxation-funded prize scheme, where everyone gets to vote on who should get prizes. Like nationalized crowd-funding, but strictly after-the-fact (unlike Kickstarter, which is very much before-the-fact).
>"Somewhere between dire straits and dead... we wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters."<p>or<p>>"Somewhere between dire straits and dead... we wanted flying cars; instead, we got a global communications service.