A Phenomenal Week for Prizes!

In his Strategy for American Innovation, released in September, President Obama directed agencies to increase their use of incentive prizes as a tool for stimulating technological innovation. The White House is enthusiastic about prizes for a number of reasons:

• Prizes are the ultimate pay for performance approach; the government only pays if someone is successful.
• Prizes allow the government to establish an ambitious goal without specifying the best means to accomplish that goal.
• Prizes can catalyze private sector investment that is many times the value of the purse.
• Prizes attract new ideas and new entrants that would never respond to a traditional RFP.
• The competition itself can capture the public imagination and change the public's attitudes about what is possible.

Last week was a phenomenal week for prizes, a number of which are being supported by the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

• The Department of Energy announced that it is providing $5.5 million for the Progressive Automotive X Prize, which will award $10 million in prizes to the developers of vehicles that can get more than 100 miles per gallon and win a cross-country race.
• NASA's Centennial Challenges Program awarded $1.65 million in prize money to a pair of innovative aerospace companies (Masten Space Systems and Armadillo Aerospace) that successfully simulated landing a spacecraft on the moon and lifting off again. These flights were done to win the Northrup Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.
• A company called LaserMotive collected a $900,000 prize in the NASA-sponsored Space Elevator Games. Teams had to race their laser-powered robots up a 900-meter long cable suspended from a hovering helicopter. This competition is managed by the Spaceward Foundation. See http://www.youtube.com/user/SpacewardFoundation for videos.
• To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA recently announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will “explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

Congratulations to the winners, the agency and private-sector sponsors, and the partnering organizations such as the X Prize Foundation and the Spaceward Foundation! The Office of Science and Technology Policy is working with a variety of Federal departments, foundations, and prize experts, and we hope to have additional progress to report on prizes in the months ahead.

Tom Kalil is Deputy Director for Policy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy