Inducing Innovation Through Prizes

Inducement Prizes and Innovation

We examine the effect of prizes on innovation using data on awards for technological development offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England at annual competitions between 1839 and 1939. We find large effects of the prizes on competitive entry and we also detect an impact of the prizes on the quality of contemporaneous patents, especially when prize categories were set by a strict rota...

Prizes for Technological Innovation

Science, technology, and innovation are essential to America’s continued economic growth, and can help achieve a wide range of national and global policy objectives. One currently underutilized tool for stimulating technological innovation is inducement prizes, which encourage efforts by contestants to accomplish a particular goal. A related policy instrument is an Advanced Market Commitment, u...

Incentives , prizes , and innovation

Innovation Inducement Prizes: Connecting Research to Policy

Innovation inducement prizes have been used for centuries. In the U.S., a recent federal policy change—the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010—clarified and simplified a path by which all federal agencies can offer innovation inducement prizes, thus intensifying interest in how government agencies can most effectively design and apply such prizes. This paper aims to review and synthesi...

How to Design Prizes - Incentives in Innovation Contests

This research paper focuses on the use of prizes in innovation contests as means to encourage participation and efforts in open innovation activities. Building on a systematic review of 69 innovation contests, we investigate differences in the design of prizes between innovation contests focusing on ideation and those with a development orientation. Results show a very heterogeneous picture, in...