Feb
11
America Should Nurture Small Innovators, Argue Vivek Wadhwa and Peter Diamandis – Have More Applied Science Competitions Like The X Prize
By Paolo von Schirach
February 11, 2012
WASHINGTON – You can promote innovation in America via complex government financial aid programs that may be poorly designed, or you can push it forward by fostering good education for budding scientists, while creating incentives for them through competitions and prizes awarded to real, marketable applications.
Bottom up innovation
The first approach may give you some more solar energy companies like Solyndra, firms that looked promising, were properly vetted by the government and then went bust because of changed market conditions, bad management or both. The second approach has two parts. The first is aimed at widening the field via the expansion of quality public education. This is a long term and quite expensive proposition. The good news is that, while improved education standards available to all is an ambitious idea, we do not need to do it all at once. We only need to maintain a clear course. Keep investing more in quality education, year after year, with cumulative gains over time.
But the second component, the creation of competitions and prizes for innovators, does not have to be very expensive, while the gains can be significant, even in the short term, if the competitions allow relatively unknown entrepreneurs to present what could be ground breaking innovation.
Support small firms with new ideas
This is the thinking shared by Vivek Wadhwa and Peter Diamandis , both of them innovation gurus and relentless promoters of new avenues that will make applied science easier to obtain, this way helping to solve problems while stengthening American competitiveness.
Wadhwa has worked on these themes for years, at Duke University and elsewhere. Diamandis is behind the X Prize competition awarded to breakthrough innovators. And both of them are involved in Singularity University, a high tech venture aimed at pushing research into new fields of science and technology.
Singularity University
The “Singularity” concept may appear a bit fanciful to many lay persons, myself included. Singularity is all about the projected new frontiers of artificial intelligence. Proponents of the concept theorize that pretty soon artificial intelligence, that is the computing power of machines, will grow exponentially, outsmarting human intelligence. Well, be that as it may, it is important that Singularity University today is behind serious projects, advancing various fields of knowledge in the US, and via collaborative academic ventures with other countries, such as Brazil.
Big corporations grow only incrementally
And it is important that these true believers in American innovation are also proponents of a bottom up approach. As Wadhwa said in a recent CNN interview, the large, established high tech firms grow only incrementally. Do not expect Microsoft to come up with the next disruptive technology. Big companies are not so nimble, they are unlikely to support disruptive innovation.
X Prize to encourage innovators
Expect instead small start ups to come up with something truly transformative. Hence the need to nurture new human talent through education, as well as through new immigration policies that will make it a lot easier for talented foreigners, many of them holding US advanced degrees, to establish their businesses here in America. And then there is the related need to provide incentives, through competitions for innovator, such as the X prize. It could be the next medical diagnostic machine co-sponsored by Qualcomm, or the next lunar lander. From energy, to health, to technologies that will clean up oil spills it is important that the X prize and others just like it will provide goals to scientists and entrepreneurs.
Remember that Lindbergh was competing for a prize
We should think that Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in May 1927 on the Spirit of St. Louis, a small souped up single engine plane, because he was participating in a competition (cash value $ 25,000) set up by New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig. We know quite a bit about that prize. First of all, Orteig’s prize was a rel challenge. For years nobody entered the competition, because a transatlantic flight appeared impossible. And then, after airplane technology had improved, many tried and failed. Some tragically.
Multiplier effect
But totally unknown Lindbergh won because he did in his on way: a small plane and just one pilot. So, setting the bar high is important to spur innovative ideas. As for the impact of Lindbergh’s flight, we know about the revolution in air travel brought about by that solo trip to Le Bourget Field in Paris in May 1927. In hindsight, that $ 25,000 prize had an enormously positive multiplier effect. Think of that.
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