The X Prize

http://www.wtnxprize.org/

The link above is to the WTN X Prize site, dominated by a form where you can suggest what X Prizes should be awarded. This is one of the coolest endeavors ever! An X Prize was just won by a group that made a second successful launch of SpaceShipOne, a totally privately funded spaceflight. The idea was that by offering a prize for achieving a truly innovative result in a given area, there would be greater incentive for individuals to pursue that result - enough incentive to make that result truly happen at all or at least happen earlier.

This is how innovation should be encouraged, rather than the current standard of government research grants. If the money that was being offered for grants today was instead offered as a prize for success, there would be people that would find the motivation to do it. I don't think government necessarily needs to be the source of the funding of the prizes, but I'd sure feel better about the expenditure if it was how it was done. That's about accountability.

As an example, there was a court decision recently (today?) by the 9th Circuit Court that the Army Corps of Engineers is already doing everything it can to keep water temperatures down in order to lessen impact of dams on the Snake River with regard to endangered salmon runs. Environmentalists were not happy. But what if there had a been an award for coming up with a dam engineering design that would have a zero-degree impact on water temperatures? Wouldn't that be much more effective than simply fighting in court?

As one last thought on this topic, isn't Google Answers (http://answers.google.com/answers/), itself another very cool idea, a fine example of this on a smaller scale?