The Role of Prizes In Innovation

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel assesses the impact on innovation of the increasing number of prizes, such as the X Prize, that reward solvers of intractable problems. From the column: 'Prizes prompt a lot of effort, far more than any sponsor could devote itself, but they generally pay only for success. That's "an important piece of shifting risk from inside the walls of the company and moving it out to the solver community," says Jill Panetta, InnoCentive's chief scientific officer. Competitors for the $10 million prize for the space vehicle spent 10 times that amount trying to win it. Contests also are a mechanism to tap scientific knowledge that's widely dispersed geographically, and not always in obvious places. Since posting its algorithm bounty in October, Netflix has drawn 15,000 entrants from 126 countries. The leading team is from Budapest University of Technology and Economics.'"

Re:Who cares about prizes?

[caffeinemessiah]

The leading team changes every few days in the Netflix prize. For the longest time, it was a guy from U Toronto called NIPS Reject, then it was the whole ML team at the same uni, then it was wxyzconsulting.com, and now it's Team Gravity. It's come to the point where successive improvements are incremental and hardly significant over the previous leader. What should be interesting now is if anyone has the big breakthrough that actually wins the prize. Check out the actual Netflix leaderboard [netflixprize.com]