Chief Prognosticator

Drive Innovation through Competition

Want to unlock the secret to driving innovation? It’s easy — make a contest. No seriously, when you leave innovation up to businesses (especially publicly traded ones), you end up with slow innovation. Profits are more important than taking risks, so what you’re left with is just enough innovation to stay competitive.

No the real way to drive innovation is to make it into a competition. Think about probably the greatest contest of all time — the race to the moon. Who was competing? The U.s and the Soviet Union! Two superpower governments with billions and trillions of dollars behind them. Now that was a contest which pushed the limits of innovation. Now, on a smaller scale, there are contests like the Lunar X-Prize and the 100-MPG Car contest which push small, private teams to do really big things. Sure there can be corporate sponsors to these activities, but the real name of the game is competition. This is how we will take the next giant leaps for humanity.