A New Era in Scientific Innovation
Regardless of your political views, there’s no doubt that history was made this week in the United States. As noted in an article in New Scientist today, President Elect Barack Obama’s platform includes a pledge to lead a new era in scientific innovation in America. According to his comprehensive Science and Technology Policy (pdf), submitted in September, this would be achieved by doubling the federal investment in basic research and by addressing the “grand challenges” of the 21st century. What does this mean to you? What is the #1 challenge you’d like to see addressed as part of this initiative? Tell us in the comments.
Tags: federal investment, Innovation, New Scientist, obama, science, science and technology policy
November 6th, 2008 at 1:51 am
I especially like the ideas of permanent tax credits and tax relief for startups and small businesses- though I’m not sure what the definitions are of small businesses since if they make more than $250,000 they’ll start getting taxed more. I personally think there should be more of an emphasis on rewarding innovation at whatever level it’s found at, from the guy on the street to the multi-billion dollar corporation.
But any types of rewards are going to be hard to grant given the current economic situation. As a result, I wonder what programs will get axed first or not even get implemented.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:07 am
[...] more what the folks at Innocentive think about the [...]
November 6th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
We need a Manhattan Project type of effort to develop a lightweight, economical and powerful battery that can power lawnmowers, chain saws, leaf-blowers and other outdoor equipemnt for at least an hour. Hopefully, the same battery could be upscaled to power automobiles for at least 300 miles without a recharge.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I would like to see it acknowledged that we collectively live in a sealed room with an internal combustion motor running with the inevitable conclusion that if we don’t turn off the motor, we will die.
I would like to see acknowledged the fact that the planet we live on is in fact a gigantic non polluting electrical energy generator, and the development of technology which will allow us to harvest this energy to store and use as needed, allowing us to turn off the internal combustion motor forever and providing us with an inexhaustible source of clean power for all things.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Health care cost in the US is out of control. A single payer system is not realistic. The best way to solve the crisis is solve problems not treat them. A solution for cancer & heart disease would greatly reduce the cost of and need for medicine. As solutions are found, resources can be used for reducing the use of internal combustion engines and for basic science research.
Yet later more space exploration is the future.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
We must find a way to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. This country has done a number of amazing things with respect to technology and I’m sure we can solve this problem. I sincerely hope the Obama administration eliminates the lobbying by the oil industry that has stiffeled the development of renewable energy.
Ed Angell
November 6th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
A Manhattan project to bring Universities and Industries together in solving our major energy issues. The following issues should be solved ASAP: 1. National power grid- perhaps localizing the power rather than centralizing power by making more effecient use of Nuclear technology-i.e. using the nuclear waste as a partial source of localized power, refinning nuclear waste to recycle the power, solar-electric power, tidal power and wind power to charge localized power grids. 2. Development of more effecient superconductors and its technology, 3. Development of wireless high power grids via the use of laser-satalite technologies to send high power pulses through space or through materials. The satalites would obtain the energy from the sun and would be pulsed down to earth via a wave type transform that can be mathematically worked out not to interfer with other wireless transmissions. 4. Magnetic field and superconductive propulsion systems 5. Develop the field of preventitive medicine on a holistic approach. This field should establish the optimum nutrients and health relative activity for each human being to minimize the huge costs of health care. Note: Most of our high costs of health care is due mainly to ignorance of proper nutrition and excercise. If this can be followed and developed as a major center of interest and research, most prescription type drugs can be elliminated for most people.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Our predicament is now evident to almost everybody – human interventions in the well-ordered systems of the global biosphere have accumulated to a breaking point – the time is short and the tasks are many.
1. Particulate emissions into the atmosphere need to be dramatically reduced, approaching zero. Global particulate emission is the second largest atmospheric driver to global heating. (This falls into the quick, easy and temporary category of “fixes”)
2. We need to get the new “giants” (India, China, Russia, Brazil,…) onboard for Kyoto-styled CO2 reductions.
3. Some interesting new work is emerging that suggesting that generalized CO2 sequestration can be done directly from the atmosphere into the Earth’s bedrock by exposing existing peridotite deposits.
4. Listed in order of minimum impacts and maximum returns, the possible ‘clean’ sources of electric power generation: Fusion, Geothermal, Hydroelectric, Wave, Solar, Wind, and Biomass. (As Mendeleev said when he rubbed crude oil, at the first Texas wells, between his fingers, “this is much too valuable to burn.”) Ed Angell’s comment is right on.
5. Irresolvable ideological discussion is a luxury — history proves that do-nothings go the way of the Dodo bird.
Let’s get to work, people!
Dani Rubin, Executive Director, British Columbia Environmental Network
November 6th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
I agree with many of the other comments already posted indicating the need to find cleaner energy sources, however that is such a huge and diverse topic, it ‘feels’ a little like the Miss America entrants’ wish for “peace on earth”. A smaller and tighter focus often produces better results.
What has troubled me over the last decade and a half is that almost all of the major projections on global warming have been under-estimations. Fifty years have become ten, then five. Certainly the science is complex, but the consistency of the ‘extra’ heat generated leads me to suspect that perhaps there is a factor or heat source that we have not yet included in our calculations. It might be something as simple as not adding in the heat generated by all the burning of the fossil fuels – I mean how much heat is produced by all of the radiators on all of the vehicles that move about on the planet each day? Until we really understand all of the contributing sources of heat generation, we can not make truly coherent plans or policy to deal with it.
So let’s first find the source of ‘the extra’.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I would like to see a rewards program to develop a far more efficient heating plant (IE “boiler” and “oil Burner unit”) which will use the standard #2 heating oil but incorporate modern technologies of “lean Burn” and emisions control. Blanket statements like “Elliminate Fossil Fuels” have a nice ring, but it will take years, if not decades to convert existing infastructure. The initiative should be a marriage of current automotive technologies with the need to produce maximim clean burning BTU’s. Millions of homes of all ages use this type of fuel in the northeast.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Get Lonnie Johnson’s solar technology (thermo electro chemical) off the drawing board and into comercial use.
http://www.johnsonems.com/jhtec.html
November 6th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Michael Berman statement is spot on: “A Manhattan project to bring Universities and Industries together in solving our major energy issues.”
Along with what Michael says: The US gov’t must get off it’s big oil, big 3, and big agriculture (and big whomever) lobby structured butt and put genuine BIG focus on large funding programs, start-up programs, and moreso grants large enough for universities & industries to push all the green technologies.
Housing design in the US is abysmal, a big majority are fuel sucking 2×4 stick structures, fast & cheap to put together – and then suck fuel forever. People who do strive forward to make an off-grid or low energy consumption house are few in numbers being the cash outlay is large and the payback is years away. Putting in just a PV system stills takes many years (10 plus – depending on what & where) before becoming revenue even. Current tax incentives and rebate programs vary state to state. This should be a federal program, in tandem with the states, iron out the differences, and provide better rebates & long term incentives with tech help programs that helps maintain these systems. All existing & new housing should be given good incentives for well-built low energy and tough structures.
EV tech costs are coming down but still buying an all electric car is far from cheap, and the masses cannot afford the cost difference. New companies like Tesla, Aptera, and others would benefit us all if they could get “tooled” to better mass produce. While the elect motors & lightwieght strong materials are very good now, more R&D needs to be put into battery, hybrid battery, and ultracap tech. I would love to own a Aptera (whatsmore a Tesla) but the outlay is too steep and then battery replacements have a steep cost somewhere down the not-so-far road. Given a good push – all this will be more affordable much sooner – rather than how many years later.
Good housing – that actually makes more energy that it uses, and feeds that more to good EV cars – is a main answer out of the oil addiction. Obviously this is not going to happen soon, and indeed must overlap with existing stuff, but I doubt that without the US gov’t putting a very focused push on all this that the overlap is not going to lean more to green anytime soon.
The US gov’t has just magically pulled 800 billion, from I do not know where, to do what, and to whose benefit? If only 10% to 20% of that amount was focused to green tech – what impact would that have?
Europe is leaps and bounds ahead – the US should be leading – not slumbering along.
BTW, I live in Indonesia (originally from MN). My own home is not an off-grid (can’t afford the PV yet), but I put in a rain water collection system and I store the water (1300 gallons) inside the house for a “cool sink”. Along with this is a free flow air design and use the rain water for a large “waterfall wall”. Internal temps are 4 degrees centrigrade or more below ambient. No air con required. My electricty average costs less than 40 bucks a month. I drive a small diesel pickup and am looking forward to either buying or maybe even making an EV. My hesitation? Yes – batteries.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Hi,
There are a lot of good ideas above of how to get rid of our need to burn fossil fuels and develop and promote other sources of energy. But we can go a long way toward reducing our need for energy consumption in the home and in businesses and not reducing our comfort by encouraging the building of partially earth sheltered buildings or even largely earth-sheltered buildings. Light can be brought in through shafts. Indirect sunlight or ambient light could be used in warm weather and direct light could be used when the outside ambient temperature is in a comfortable range. Windows that are highly efficient could be appropriately placed to bring views without loosing or gaining radiant energy that is not desired. An earth-sheltered building in most moderate climates can easily be maintained in the 55 to 65 degree fahrenheit range without the need of energy to heat or cool. Thus it would take little energy to keep it in a comfortable range. Lighting, heating and air conditioning needs, etc. could thus be met using alternate energies such as solar or wind. In some climates it might even be possible to supply all energy needs without even being on the grid. Tax incentives to homeowners, business owners and builders and contractors for clean energy would be one way that the new administration could speed this conservation effort. There are already communities out there working on such principles. Innovations could make it even better, but we already have the means to greatly reduce our energy needs if we just apply them on a larger scale.
I am a little concerned about the focusing of solar energy collected in space back to earth. How can this be done without accidentally impacting migratory birds? Would there be sensors strong enough to redirect the energy when flocks of migratory birds are passing through? Even transmitting at night would have to be done carefully so as not to harm flocks of geese. Who hasn’t heard these birds migrating at night and seen them on a moonlit night?
Just a few thoughts.
November 7th, 2008 at 12:18 am
The President Barack Obama,was the realization of a Miracle, begged to God during many Centuries….. it has Certified us that we all can, if we want and we have support!
November 7th, 2008 at 6:49 am
I think for health, Adopting and making the public also adopted to this ShwaasPathy can definetely reduce the medical expenses per person. So Mr. President can look this also as one of the areas to explore for the benefit of the society.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:34 am
First off, we need to change the patent system so that these universities and industries cannot prevent research from being done in the first place. No patent extensions. No business process patents. Purge from the system the “How to Make a Peanut Butter and Jell Sandwich.” Second, we need to change the copyright system back to 14 years or have compulsory licensing with reasonable prices. Thirdly, we need to understand that major changes will never happen from the top down. We should change the tax system so that if you don’t burn carbon emitting fuels, you don’t pay taxes. This would allow people to avoid paying yet provide a public benefit. The FAA needs to stay out of where you can put up a windmill.
There is a reason why the military started the “Grand Challenge”. Because it is cheaper, faster and more efficient.
This Manhattan Project metaphor is just that a metaphor and metaphors aren’t real. They are a narrative we tell ourselves to make us feel better.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:29 am
I believe we have the academic ability, infrastructure and now funding, incentive and support to establish a self contained hydrogen vehicle. This technology would hinge upon the vehicle’s ability to generate it’s own hydrogen fuel by converting salt water “on the fly”. After the fuel is burned the objective would be to reclaim the water that is generated from combustion and recycle the by-product to be reconverted back to hydrogen.
This would be a continuous cycle and we would not require hydrogen distribution outlets. The elimination of hydrocarbon emissions would be tremendous. The hazards and costs associated with battery technology disposal etc and the fossil fuels required to re-charge battery technology would be eliminated. This would be a difficult undertaking but the basic ingredients are there and the payoff would be huge.
At the very least, hydrogen fuel should be a major focus especially since the auto industry would only need to focus on retooling for storage and production of the fuel itself. The internal combustion engine could be easily modified “as it currently stands” to burn this safe endless fuel. Additional engine improvements and efficiency could be addressed as the country begins to recover and accept the new technology.
Even if hydrogen distribution was necessary, we could start by converting small internal combustion engines (lawn mowers, motorcycles etc) and selling the hydrogen through home improvement outlets and or traditional gas stations much like we currently distribute propane. The objective would be to create a business case (revenue and demand) that would justify expansion of points of distribution and additional production.
Ultimately, this would create new jobs and save existing jobs while helping to solve the environmental concerns and eliminating dependency on fossil fuels.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:39 am
After 2 centuries of shrinking, Alaska glaciers got thicker this year
Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008. Unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July and August.
“In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound,” said U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. “On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying, located at about 1,500 feet elevation, did not become snow free until early August.
“In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years.”
Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.
“It’s been a long time on most glaciers where they’ve actually had positive mass balance,” Molnia said.
That’s the way a scientist says the glaciers got thicker in the middle.
Mass balance is the difference between how much snow falls every winter and how much snow fades away each summer. For most Alaska glaciers, the summer snow loss has for decades exceeded the winter snowfall.
The result has put the state’s glaciers on a long-term diet. Every year they lose the snow of the previous winter plus some of the snow from years before. And so they steadily shrink.
Since Alaska’s glacial maximum back in the 1700s, Molnia said, “I figure that we’ve lost about 15 percent of the total area.”
What might be the most notable long-term shrinkage has occurred at Glacier Bay, now the site of a national park in Southeast Alaska. When the first Russian explorers arrived in Alaska in the 1740s, there was no Glacier Bay. There was simply a wall of ice across the north side of Icy Strait.
That ice retreated to form a bay and what is now known as the Muir Glacier. And from the 1800s until now, the Muir Glacier just kept retreating and retreating and retreating. It is now back 57 miles from the entrance to the bay, said Tom Vandenberg, chief interpretative ranger at Glacier Bay.
That’s farther than the distance from glacier-free Anchorage to Girdwood, where seven glaciers overhang the valley surrounding the state’s largest ski area. The glaciers there, like the Muir and hundreds of other Alaska glaciers, have been part of the long retreat.
Overall, Molnia figures Alaska has lost 10,000 to 12,000 square kilometers of ice in the past two centuries, enough to cover an area nearly the size of Connecticut.
Molnia has just completed a major study of Alaska glaciers using satellite images and aerial photographs to catalog shrinkage. The 550-page “Glaciers of Alaska” will provide a benchmark for tracking what happens to the state’s glaciers in the future.
Climate change has led to speculation they might all disappear. Molnia isn’t sure what to expect. As far as glaciers go, he said, Alaska’s glaciers are volatile. They live life on the edge.
“What we’re talking about to (change) most of Alaska’s glaciers is a small temperature change; just a small fraction-of-a-degree change makes a big difference. It’s the mean annual temperature that’s the big thing.
“All it takes is a warm summer to have a really dramatic effect on the melting.”
Or a cool summer to shift that mass balance the other way.
One cool summer that leaves 20 feet of new snow still sitting atop glaciers come the start of the next winter is no big deal, Molnia said.
Ten summers like that?
Well, that might mark the start of something like the Little Ice Age.
During the Little Ice Age – roughly the 16th century to the 19th – Muir Glacier filled Glacier Bay and the people of Europe struggled to survive because of difficult conditions for agriculture. Some of them fled for America in the first wave of white immigration.
The Pilgrims established the Plymouth Colony in December 1620. By spring, a bitterly cold winter had played a key role in helping kill half of them. Hindered by a chilly climate, the white colonization of North America through the 1600s and 1700s was slow.
As the climate warmed from 1800 to 1900, the United States tripled in size. The windy and cold city of Chicago grew from an outpost of fewer than 4,000 in 1800 to a thriving city of more than 1.5 million at the end of that century.
The difference in temperature between the Little Ice Age and these heady days of American expansion?
About three or four degrees, Molnia said.
The difference in temperature between this summer in Anchorage – the third coldest on record – and the norm?
About three degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Does it mean anything?
Nobody knows. Climate is constantly shifting. And even if the past year was a signal of a changing future, Molnia said, it would still take decades to make itself noticeable in Alaska’s glaciers.
Rivers of ice flow slowly. Hundreds of feet of snow would have to accumulate at higher elevations to create enough pressure to stall the current glacial retreat and start a new advance. Even if the glaciers started growing today, Molnia said, it might take up to 100 years for them to start steadily rolling back down into the valleys they’ve abandoned.
“It’s different time scales,” he said. “We’re just starting to understand.”
As strange it might seem, Alaska’s glaciers could appear to be shrinking for some time while secretly growing. Molnia said there are a few glaciers in the state now where constant snow accumulations at higher elevations are causing them to thicken even as their lower reaches follow the pattern of retreat fueled by the global warming of recent decades.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:56 am
hansen has falsified his data…
models cant predict the weather next year, and we believe they can do so over a hundred year with crap data…
meanwhile, the libertarian green party used to be the nazi party… so maybe its more about control than its about an actual scientific thing.
lets make this simple… where did all the oil come from? plants… biological materials, right?
where was it all before it was sequestered? in the air… so at sometime in the past all that oil was in the air at some time… but the planet was not a wastland with no life, since the life had to be there to sequester the carbon..
the sun mediates earth temperatures… not carbon… carbon content changes based on the temperature that the sun causes… higher temperatures, the higher the carbon… lower temperatures, the more that gets sequestered…
GLOBAL sea ice area: now same as in 1979!
As of yesterday the global sea ice anomaly at cryosphere reached 0. Four weeks ago it was at a negative 2.6 million sq kilometers. This is the fastest move in the 30 year history. The sea surface temperature anomaly around the Antarctic remains strongly negative [colder than baseline]
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the ice extent for October 1979 (when satellite measurements began) is 18 million sq km, for October 2008 the ice extent was 18.1 million sq km. Ice concentration shows even greater increases, from 13.6 million sq km, to 13.9 million.
Not a huge increase but certainly notable since everyone has been screaming about Antarctic ice melt off, obviously that is not happening. Interior ice is increasing at an even greater rate. According to NOAA GISS data winter temperatures in the antarctic has actually fallen by 1øF since 1957, with the coldest year being 2004. All the while global CO2 levels have gone up and the mainstream media has been reporting near catastrophic warming conditions. The MSM and certain segments of the scientific community truly must have no shame.
“While the penguins would normally turn back when they hit the warmer Benguela waters, the current has been “exceptionally cold” this year” – The Washington Post
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DOMESTIC WIND TURBINES: ‘A NET USER OF ELECTRICITY’
A fun email from Paul Biggs [p.m.biggs@bham.ac.uk] below:
The October edition of Which? Magazine [in the UK] reported on domestic wind turbines in an article entitled ‘Wind turbine blows cold.’ Which? installed one in a house and monitored it from December 2007 to June 2008. The result was that it used more electricity than it generated. This is because the turbine includes an “inverter” that converts the energy into electricity to go into the mains, and the inverter needs power which it draws whether the wind is turning the turbine or not. If the ‘greens’ want to ’save the planet’ with domestic wind turbines, then they will have to make sure that they live somewhere very windy. Given the energy used and costs involved in manufacturing, installing, maintaining, plus eventual decommissioning – there may not be anywhere that is windy enough!
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\\/\/\/\
meanwhile, this year will see record trees burned to heat homes… yes, trees have been cut down in record amounts to feed chimineys and wood stoves this winter and save costs…
too bad the people all desiring this thing that the state can force the rules of economics.
not enough capital pooled, not enough for the luxury which is green thinking… note that at substence we poltue and damage the most.
pollution is a time based illusion… given enough time, and what happens? given a real long time and the whole damn plate will go under the ground and be melted down…
and when the expense of digging up new mateiral is more expensive than mining garbage dumps for material, then we will find that these places which we hate will be new gold mines for thos with tech.
nuclear waste… what a joke… we are on the verge of commercial public space flight, and we cant figure out using the sun for disposal its better than a hole in a salt mine trying to save the crap for 10,000 years..
why 10,000 years unless your idea of the future is stagnation taht doesn open up space for raw materials and dangerous manufacturing!!!!
just as when i was a child, food was seasonal… but the capital pooled by capitalistic progress constantly improving to get an edge… creates the ability to deliver, even by plane food that is a luxury that the sun king could not have imagined… (any one notice that the american poor can eat better than king louis? and henry the Vii? i bet not).
and why are we making a slave proletariat when robotics will do that and make no one a slave?
we are now too collecive to have good visions of the future.
global warming beingt such a collectivist game from hsitory…
you cant invent in a group any more than you can orgasm collectively. it may be at teh same time, but you dont share brains, so its all individuals pretending.
one cant invent or change the future if there is a dikta of how it should be from a collectivist concept.
its why russia never invented much… and china… and all the other redistributionist states.
they prevented thought that was different…
they prevented validity (see lysenko)
they then took property so that captial cant pool and increase and so give people the choices that grant the luxury of the extra cost of doing things green.
its why the US is the GREENEST place if you look at it as a function of efficiency…
there is enough capital here to waste on scrubbers, and clean ups, and more expensive methods that make more expensive products that we have a common sense choice to prefer.
but understand that much of what we are seeing is a game with time preference and false beleives to control outcomes.
remember, we scream to the state to control the outcomes… either they become jack booted to do that, or they become schemingly manipulative… and truth goes out the window the way stalin threw it out!!!!
how else control outcomes? force, or trickery…
and neither imply freedom of will to create, invent, succeed, and make a better world..
because force and trickery are entihetical to progress…
November 7th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
We need to rethink the concept of abstraction of value (money) itself
November 7th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
As we have no democracy nowhere in the world we need to rethink this idea new and find ways and means to REALLY give power to the people. Right now nobody wants this.
As our interest based money system is unjust from the very beginning, there is an urgent need to rethink the way we see and use money.
As “socialism” is a lie which had only to be invented because everybody was aware of the effects of capitalism, we should dedect the lies that have blinded us and find human ways to deal with letting everybody participate in the riches of this planet.
As this planet by nature belongs to everybody the same portion we have to rethink our concepts of “privacy” and find new ways to share and use all common ground.
As capitalism is “inspired” by just one archetypic idea, the AAMMM (absolute male macho mind), which results in continous imperialism (until which end?) we could think about creative new ways to make business.
As all media is full with information, that in most cases only serves one party, e.g. the economical and political dominating “elite”, we need to help people to understand their beeing manipulated and misused for many goals that are against their own interests, dreams and hopes.
As all churches have only one common interest, to dominate and use peoples minds, we have to find ways to strengthen people, to get free from this parasital way of being influenced and mislead, and instead, to find back to trust in themselves.
November 8th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Could Crowd Funding + Crowd Sourcing be a Solution to some of these problems?
Terrific discussion thread. I wanted to take the opportunity to get any feedback you might have on an idea we’ve been thinking about relative to these larger challenges that will require significant means and global focus.
As we all know, large amounts of resources and attention must be brought together around these enormous problems affecting our planet. Prize based innovation continues to be intriguing in this regard and often can drive disproportionate amounts of capital and effort towards solving these challenges (e.g., the Ansari X-Prize resulted in $100MM being spent toward a $10MM prize and was concluded successfully, lapping governmental efforts do drive similar efforts). The difficulty of course is that government, industry consortia, etc. aren’t necessarily good at moving with urgency and may not be the best to judge and prioritize the problems that matter in all cases.
So we have been thinking through the possibility of merging the notions of crowd funding and crowd sourcing. Here’s the basic idea:
1) A preeminent board of globally recognized leaders in an area are assembled relative to a cause (e.g., Global Warming and CO2 emissions). The must articulate an important, impactful, and actionable challenge to materially advance the cause (e.g., Cost Effective CO2 Scrubbing Technology for use in 3rd World Manufacturing);
2) The Challenge is promoted globally and goes live initially with a prize amount of $0;
3) People are invited to participate with their minds in solving the problems and/or with their wallets. The prize amount grows in relation to public interest. May be valuable to give public progress updates from time to time in order to stir interest and to further build prize amounts;
4) Over the course of the challenge (6months – 2 years), funds are collected and held in escrow;
5) The board would select the winning solution and the prize paid out. If no prize is awarded the funds are returned or applied to follow-up challenge as defined by the board. The winning solutions would be put into the public domain through an Open Source style licensing approach to ensure its unfettered use (and derivative use) in perpetuity.
Potentially bringing millions of dollars to bear on the most important problems, this approach merges kind of free market activist philanthropy approach (active and directed donations) with the power of prizes to galvanize and focus energy toward solving a problem. It may be more quickly put into action that government and industry alternatives alone in many cases. And it allows the broader populace to speak (and contribute) to the problems that are important to them.
Thoughts? Reactions? Could this work for some of these kinds of problems discussed in this thread?
Thanks for your energy and insight.
Dwayne Spradlin
CEO InnoCentive
November 8th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Dear Mr. Spradlin et al.,
Thank you all for initiating, responding to, and then extending this discussion. I would like to address both the original question on Federal S&T policy and the idea on Crowd Funding & Crowd Sourcing—in reverse order.
Crowd Funding & Crowd Sourcing idea:
This is an interesting concept. Sponsoring a “communal” X-Prize that is provocative and attainable would be great. However, I am concerned that an Open-Source licensing approach may not result in the kind of investment necessary to move the resulting invention through the innovation and application stages to result in an economically-viable product or process for sale on the open market. It takes a huge investment of capital to move an invention through these stages, and profit-making organizations may not be willing to take the required risks without the intellectual property (IP) protection offered by an exclusive licensing agreement (like the “temporary monopoly” offered by a patent).
Also, while the prize money (and fame) may be enough to induce inventors to participate, and the publicity would be great for InnoCentive; what would be the incentive for individuals to contribute? How about splitting (proportionally) any funds generated from IP licensing agreements with the contributing sponsors?
Federal Science & Technology policy:
I believe that the most important aspect of the Obama/Biden Science and Innovation Plan is the second bullet which advocates the doubling of Federal investment in basic research over the next decade. This has been done in the medical field by doubling (twice) the Nat’l Institute of Health (NIH) budget. A similar investment now needs to occur through the Nat’l Science Foundation (NSF). This is especially urgent given the decline in corporate spending on basic science, including the recent announcement that basic research will cease at Lucent/Bell Labs.
Most private-sector R&D is applied. Without the discoveries in basic research that fuel innovation, future applications-driven R&D will dry up over the 20 to 30 year lab-to-factory (or science-to-technology/engineering) gestation period required. We have been fortunate to “harvest” the basic science discoveries of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. But what discoveries are in our basic science “pipeline” now? There are some, but often they are stuck in the Dept of Energy (DoE) National Labs or hidden away in Dept of Defense (DOD) black programs. Some progress has been made in public/private partnerships (eg., CRADAs) with the DoE and NASA, but the DOD (i.e., DARPA) discoveries are, by their very nature, not available for many years.
Therefore, I believe that basic science funding through increasing the funding available for NSF grants to universities and non-profit organizations is the best way to increase the scientific discoveries that will lead to technological progress in the decades ahead.
Dirk Vanderloop
Professor Emeritus
California State University
November 10th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Intellectual property protection should be expanded to include a little coverage for “muse effect” innovation.
For example, if a successful invention was obviously inspired by (”fairly traceable to”) an earlier invention or idea, then the author of the earlier idea should get a percent, low enough to keep it from going to court but high enough to show some recognition.
Shakespeare writes something to the effect that the muse is the real prime mover.
According to Art. I Sec. 8 of the Constitution the whole point of the patent office is to “promote the useful arts” and this approach would encourage much more innovation.
Bret Cahill
November 10th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
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Sovereign Citizen
http://www.aeonpi.com
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November 12th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
the industrial revolution and free market gave power (property) to the people that they never had before. now the movement of such is taking power away from the people and putting into the hands of people like chavez, putin, kim jong, castro & brother, etc..
in case you socilaist wingnuts havent noticed… the most wars, the most murders, the most torture, the most starvation, and the most theiving dictators, the highest levels of pollution, all come from socialist backgrounds and pushed socialim… stalin, hitler, lenin, mao, castro, hitler, mussolini, kim jong, pol pot, and a whole lot more.
ALL OF THEM BEING SOCIALST REDISTRIBUTION RULERS
so the idea of empowering a beuracratic feudal system to return to the feudal era of moer equal than others rulers, is not a smart way to get what your all asking for.
our government used to be for the people since the people were the government and they voted with their support and property.
but socialism promises to control outcomes.
how can you control outcomes if you dont control people?
so a socailist state ignores its people more and more to pretend to control what it cant control
it creates a system where beuracrats know more than einsteins, as einstiens dont run for top office.
its really a stupid system, and only people pretending to be smart will sign up for it
the others are those who understand the control over others lives it will give them, and thats why they are in it.
it wasnt pol pot, mao, stalin, lenin, mao, kruschev, putin, and all the others that invented all the things that you have… it wasnt the government either.
it was individuals who had acccess to capital that was not under the control of the state..
but if you think that mandating an end will make ithappen. then your in the same boat that stalin mandated outcoems, and then killed the people who coldnt produce them because he, like most here, could not tell why their ideas could enver work. so the people who cant make the control policies happen, become enemies who dont want it to happen, they are then removed.
wake up, many others who came from this thype of system can warn you.
you cant change a pickle into a cucumber. talk to immigrants from those regimes and note that they are lucker than you…
because they had a place to run to.
you wont, as this is the only place to run to, and if it isnt here proteting freedoms, then you dont have a place to flee when the same polices are erected as a expression of premises.
or havent you noticed the inane new laws and things happening? all seeking to control people..
cameras, ids, tracking systems, monitors, tons of different police orgs, regulations on regulations.
thats not freedom
edison would have failed if he started under todays system… because todays system is intended to stop all that for social justice reasons.
in case you guys dont get it. no new inventing under socailism or social justice. a new invention incurs huge social justice costs because it cant go to everyone equally. so the only way to avoid this is to insure all can get a new expwensive thing that may not work equally (which will never happen), or you stop inventing new solutions… no new thing, no social justice costs.
also, you cant have a economy that has planned outcomes if new inventions are created that end up rejiggering everything disruptively.. which is why these states dont invent much..
under socialism:
invention is bad because of social justice cost
invention is bad because it disrupts planned outcomes
invention is bad because it grants an person more than someone who doesnt try
invention is bad because it cant be given to all equally the day its concieved.
with all you guys wanting inventiosn and things… you sure are siding with the most moribund system to do it. (even royalty does better).
the free market system works better.
GREEN inventions are only happening inthe free market countries.
socialist countries are selling weapons and nuclear bomb proliferation..
russia and china, the most polluted places on the planet BEFORE capitalism there.
whole cities so polluted that you cant see across the street.
where did windmill tech coem from? individual people with propoerty pooled it with people with skills and they made these things because they wanted to meet a market and had nothing to stop them from using their own property.
russia didnt come up with medical inventiosn… lysenkosim, liek todays false greenie stuff, killed all that… so now russia cant catch up ever.
they have a 59 year life expetancy…
we in the free market have 80 year plus life expectancy.
you guys better rethink things… its better if you stop whining for he state to force invention to occur on demand (something that cant be done. ask lysenko and all the doctors killed for failing).
why not pool your own resources. hire a phd, and work together to invent the solution your selve instead of inventino ways to tell the state to steal money?
the state in a sociliast thing basically convinces a part of the population that if they give the state permission against the other part, they will plunder them, and then share the stolen goods with the people that give permission. except that once they have that power, they take all the proceeds as there is no wya for the weaker poor with no property to stop them after they disarm the wealthy who are stronger.
duh.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
According to Art. I Sec. 8 of the Constitution the whole point of the patent office is to “promote the useful arts” and this approach would encourage much more innovation.
no it wouldnt.
why should i add to the pie when my portion for the invention is so small?
IP is paid for with very small amounts compared to the profits of the actual product being made.
this suggestion shows a total ignorance of how patents work..
and so someoen who has no idea of how they work or the principals involved has a stupendous amount of hubris and amazing chutzpah in trying to suggest a fix.
its like someone pretending to be a doctor and having a socialist cargo cult mentality thinks that going through the motions of appearing smart, makes one smart rather than the content.
the patent is a limited monopoly for 20 or so years.
the person who invents gets this monopoly as compensation for the invention.
when it runs out, everyone can use that information.
if i had to pay muse fees, i would have no money to create a new product.
go to any modern patent on google.. pick one… now go to the bottom and look at the patents that exist connected to it.
in six degrees of separation, everyone can know everyone on the planet of 6-7 billion people.
how many degrees of separation woudl make every new patent owe something to everything tha ever came befoer in perpetuity.
if this was implemented as a set of burdens. over time, the burden woudl increse till nothing happened any more.. the whole machine would stop.
so your solution would result in the end of innovation through the patent syhstem.
good improvement…
i wish the lefties here would LEARN… rather than pose… go ahead yell at me that your not posers, but you gus come up with ABYSMALLY functioning good SOUNDING ideas that hve no basis in reality.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
read this and learn (maybe)
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8362
Hong Kong has an impressive reputation for economic freedom and classical-liberal virtues. In a series of articles, Milton Friedman used Hong Kong to show how the power of free markets combined with little else can create wealth, pointing out that its per-capita income rose from 28 percent of Britain’s in 1960 to 137 percent of Britain’s in 1996. As Friedman wrote in 1998, “Compare Britain—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century economic superpower on whose empire the sun never set—with Hong Kong, a spit of land, overcrowded, with no resources except for a great harbor. Yet within four decades the residents of this spit of overcrowded land had achieved a level of income one-third higher than the residents of its former mother country.”
yeah… your suggestions are opposite this..
by the way…. did you know that prior to rampant socialism in the US, just three eastern states supplied 50% of the worlds production goods?
thats how powerful free market capitalism. is.
but the othe problem is that it gives politicians nothing to do…
it prevents them from getting larger and getting more powerful (and state is the thing that denies peoples rights, not companies – cause you can always leave and do somethign about it in a free state).
it can turn a dry island with no natural resouces (japan) and have it in 20 years outcompete the largest coutnry, with the most natural resouces, and a socailist state (russia), who is still a huge third world country that relies on natural resources and has no real economy comparitively.
all this on a sand covered volcanic island system that has a population on par with the US on a piece of land the size of california.
by the way you greenies. you also have nos ense of proportion. the world is too crowded, right? well you can take all 7 billion people and move them to one US state, and they would all get more than an acre of land. thats 43,560 square feet = 4,840 square yards each!
you can sput out the names of 20 japanese products… then do it again.
bet you would be hard pressed to name three russian products and couldnt do it again after..
thats the difference between the productivity of the two systems.
our system allows homeless to afford cell phones…
their system prevents professionals from earning in a month what that cell phone costs!!!!!
but you want their system bcause they told you it was better?
and that you think your so smart, how can so many people be wrong.
i dont know, you tell me how the population of germany afer adopting socialism murdered 12 million people (6 million jews)?
i guess so many people CAN be wrong when they choose leaders that lie to them, and they refuse to check and call them out on it.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
and lastly (so as hopefully you can see your mistakes)
While working in the Shanghai railway station as a porter, Lai was given his first chocolate bar by a traveler. Hungry, Lai immediately ate it. Running after the man, he asked where this wonderful food came from and the answer was “Hong Kong.” Determined to get to the place where such wonders were available, Lai eventually persuaded his mother to allow him to escape and was smuggled out of China in the bottom of a fishing boat. On his arrival in Hong Kong, he went to work the same night in a garment factory. Today, Lai is a billionaire, owner of one of the most successful media companies in Asia. His drive and entrepreneurial skills played a major role in his success, of course. (Lai movingly tells his story in the Acton Institute’s documentary The Call of the Entrepreneur.) But it was the freedom available in Hong Kong that allowed him to put his talents to work. That freedom took many forms, including an absence of the currency restrictions in force at the time in the United Kingdom and much of Europe, and few laws regulating businesses. As a result, Hong Kong began to flourish.
Why? As Hong Kong’s last British governor, Christopher Patten, wrote in his memoir, East and West, the refugees from communism who flooded into Hong Kong arrived in China’s only free city; it was indeed (in the words of Chinese journalist Tsang Ki-fan) “the only Chinese society that, for a brief span of 100 years, lived through an ideal never realized at any time in the history of Chinese society—a time when no man had to live in fear of the midnight knock on the door.” Hong Kong had a competent government, pursuing market economics under the rule of law. It was a government that fully met the Confucian goal—“Make the local people happy and attract migrants from afar.”
The laissez-faire attitude of the Hong Kong government on economic matters was cemented by Sir John Cowperthwaite, the colony’s financial secretary from 1961 to 1971, whom Welsh called a “political economist in the tradition of Gladstone or John Stuart Mill” and the personification of “unreconstructed Manchester-school free traders.” Cowperthwaite had almost complete control of Hong Kong government finances and used it to implement his policy of “positive nonintervention.” Friedman gave Cowperthwaite a great deal of the credit for Hong Kong’s success, citing approvingly Cowperthwaite’s refusal to collect most economic statistics on the grounds that “[i]f I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.” Jimmy Lai has a bronze bust of Cowperthwaite at his company’s entrance (as well as ones of Friedman and F. A. Hayek).
Cowperthwaite deserves the accolades he has received. During his decade as financial secretary, real wages rose by 50 percent and the portion of the population in acute poverty fell from 50 to 15 percent. What is remarkable is that Hong Kong accomplished this with no resource other than its people. The colony had no real agricultural land, no natural resources, and even the one resource it did have—people—lacked much education. Indeed, few at the time thought that the masses of refugees who reached Hong Kong during the 1950s would amount to anything other than a burden for the state.
Most remarkably, Hong Kong’s transformation occurred when social democrats ruled Europe and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society dominated American politics, both reflecting the consensus among the political elites in Europe and North America that the welfare state and interventionist economic policies were the only sensible direction for advanced societies. Even in the developing world, interventionist economic policies like industrialization through import substitution, which relied on high tariff walls to protect domestic industries, were widely accepted. Tiny Hong Kong thus managed to adopt and hold to free-market and free-trade policies that ran counter to the policies of the British government and the consensus of policy analysts and development economists everywhere, and did it while perched precariously on the edge of a massive communist dictatorship in the midst of self-destructive policies like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
so while the rest of the world bowed to people trying to control capitalism to get more out of it
like most here.
a person like lai, a very poor man in shanghai… with the taste of a chocolate bar, makes a billion dollars and becomes one of the richest men in the world.
other than the head guy of a socialist regime, no one gets that in a state that redistributes.
hong kong became a larger producer than the total population of england.
imagine if we never let that productivity be crippled as we have (And then blame it for it as an excuse to add more crippling).
we would be mining garbage dumps for raw materials instead of the ground… (duh)
nuclear materia would never be stored in the ground… proliveration of nuclear energy and cheap electricity would have made production move miles ahead forward, and we could be sending the material to the SUN… never storing it here… (and any other massively bad stuff too).
in case you fruitbats didnt notice, we are only green today because green is a luxury!!!!
got that?
so if the population doesnt have a rich component, there is no one that can afford to spend 7 dolalrs on a dozen eggs instead of 2.50. and so there is no way for that to become the norm and compete and build, and so free range and such is out…
in case you hacent noticed in these economic doldrums green things are going out the window…
in bad times luxuries go away first… green is a luxury…
we could have been warming ourselves with clean nuclear electrical…
instead we are using oil and coal.
and now because of green games, who think high oil prices will slow carbon usage (which doestn effect the planet the way they think), people are cutting down trees to put in their fireplaces to heat their houses instead of oil… at 1/16th the efficiency… not to mention that they not only spit out more polutuion and carbon, but they are also taking a carbon scrubber out of commission.
its this kind of abysmal thinking that makes the socialis statist solution worse every time.
and for good principaled reasons…
something that the posers who pretend to be intelligent dont get…
November 12th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
If an underfunded “inventor” of a product that requires a lot of R & D could be encouraged to go on record — publicly or in a confidentiality agreement — stating that he didn’t know enough about the actual solution to file a patent it would provide rights to those who do have the resources to develop the product.
Providing some kind of rights for this kind of work would greatly accellerate innovation.
Bret Cahill
November 17th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
the minute you remove reward, people go do something else…
yiou want the help of the smartest people? then dont chintz them…
the industrial revolution allowed unknowns to earn alot and the people to have personal power, something they completely lose under socialism… (but hey, your going to have to live in that hell to know what its like because everyone is too stupid to understand why they want a DICTATORSHIP, which is what marx promised… duh).
I have a meeting tomorrow with the IP office of the hospital i work for… its taken me 25 years to get this far because the socalists have iproved the system for their large corporate buddies
since that helps centralized planning. you guys talk as if socialism is capitalism. you have to LOVE huge singular coporations that do everything if your a socialist!!! thats what central planning does… how else control all production? by making millions of tiny companies you cant control? again… the socialsits here ahve little ability to think. and thiniing is what inventors do…
why not give up on improving the system? why not return it to what worked even better before?
oh yeah… cause arbitrary change is progress..
t what we are listening to here are people who dont understand the system, who believe in infinite improvement, who believe large companies are a sign of capitalism (When they are a sign of facisms marraige of state and business), who they themselves dont invent at all..
cant wait till they turn their attention to improving brain surgery… as none of them have the humility to say… hey! i dont really understand this… maybe i should learn, and perhaps undertand the system empirically to be able to make effective changes? nope… just change it.. that will improve it.
meanwhile, most of their suggestions take all the energy out of things.
like socialists calling for an X prize? why? so that the winner can have it all taken away from the state?
so biblical of the athiests, what god giveth with one hand, he taketh witn another?
for every invention that the world knows from the soviet union, i will give you 10 earth shattering ones from the US…
and yet you want to improve this system, and havent realizet hat the improvements of the past 30 years haev created the situation of needing improvments?
that your improvments deflate impetus and motivation, while denying the individual rewards, and yet expect them to work.
take the last post right above this one… the person thinks that an idea with no principals is a patentable thing… like the commercial that seeks to rip inventors off…
ther is no such thing as an inventor that invents and doesnt know the principals of operaqtions…
such a person is not an inventor, such is a person who fantasizes and believes that the fantasy is the important part… (while totally ignoring principals).
so how can such a person make a meaningful suggestion of improvement when they cant even get teh basics of whats being patented?
the idea of a xerox machine is not what is patented, the realized methods that make a xerox machine work are whats patentable…
and his suggestion?
give those who say… “i imiagine a machine that can monitor blood sugar” all the rights to all the work that realizes the concept of a machine that monitors blood sugar.
which would totally destroy all innovation as people can come up with imaginary ideas and squat on them since the idea is all ther is.
its sad that we no longer have a population that can say.. hey, i admit i dont know… so i would have to learn more before i suggest improfments..
nope.. now everyone is an expert at everything and they will just roll up their sleeves and improve things… why? because improvement is change, and they can make change as much as anyone else..
and since truth is relative, who cares if the suggestions born out of ideology can work! we only care that they caome from ideollgy and they sound good..
like the person who claimed we have to change the valuation of money..
what a moron… why? because he doestn get that the value of something is dependent on the needs of someone else. a person who is dehydrated will pay more for water, than a person who lives on a fresh water lake.
all circumstances are not equivalent, so all values are not equivalent…
anyone who can state this is a moron who hasnt learned why millions starved in socialist states.
because peoplel like the jokers above were in control.
June 27th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Well put writing/ will come back again soon.
June 27th, 2009 at 2:25 am
Nice article:) Will come back again:
January 15th, 2010 at 3:43 am
interesting article I have just added you to my favorites list. Keep up the good work!