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X Prize News
The X Prize Foundation has received $7m in new funding to develop more X prizes and The Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (?!) says they will try to land a robot on the moon within the next 3 months.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on June 26, 2008 at 01:07 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Ten million dollars as a prize is a joke if it is intended that such prizes will stimulate innovation.
At best, a ten million dollar prize will confer prestige for research that would have been done anyway.
If a prize is to stimulate significant investment, and cover the conisderable risk of being beaten by a rival and failing to win the prize, it needs to be *hundreds* of millions of dollars.
Posted by: BGC at Jun 26, 2008 1:22:01 PM
But these prizes do work. Look at the first X-Prize - it was a complete success. True, there is no way that the money will cover the costs of development, but the incentives of prestige, media coverage, and contributing to a worthy cause (perhaps amongst others) seem to be enough.
These are tasks that are very difficult and very expensive, but they are so frickin' sweet that a gentle shove in the right direction seems to be all it takes to get some independently wealthy technophiles to drop a huge chunk of change on them.
Posted by: engineer at Jun 26, 2008 2:01:42 PM
A comment on the second article: "This is not a X PRIZE attempt. The article has misconstrued a rocket flight trial for a prize attempt. The ARCA team has only announced their first trial flight of their rocket system. This is not an attempt to reach the Moon or go for the GLXP. The website clearly describes the launch as a test flight to try to reach space at 100km altitude."
Yeah, I thought something sounded funny.
Posted by: Nick Tarleton at Jun 26, 2008 9:36:11 PM
Also, I'd question the value of X-Prizes for accomplishments that would already seem to be worth an order of magnitude or two more than the X-Prize itself. (See: The Automotive X-Prize). --sw
Posted by: Scott Wood at Jun 27, 2008 6:49:34 PM
