Okay - didn't I read somewhere that incentives for the top dogs at AIG were a bad thing? Didn't I hear Dan Pink say incentives are the bane of business innovation? Didn't I see countless tweets and posts on how we need to do away with extrinsic reward programs, hold hands and sing Kumbaya to drive business performance?
Yeah - you heard it too? Hmmm....
So what do you think of this headline:
The White House Looks Towards Incentivized Prizes as a Strategy for American Innovation
Yeah... thought so.
The link above is for a post that then connects to the full post on the Office of Science & Technology Policy blog.
From the OSTP post:
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.
You know me - I'm a big proponent of incentives and rewards - when structured and applied correctly. But this flies in the face of recent "announcements" about awards. Specifically:
- Incentives for innovation and collaboration decrease performance in those areas (see Dan Pink response here)
- Prizes as pay for performance - especially in large amounts create undesirable behaviors in the pursuit of the goal
I've posted before on the X-Prize and how I see that being a great catalyst of change. And in truth I pretty much agree with a lot of the points above.
What I don't agree with is the situational application of these ideas - if it is applied to something the government wants it's good - if we apply it without their blessing it is bad.
Can you have it both ways? I guess so. (BTW - not a big fan of the word "incentivize" either.)
A
Marketing and Incentive Design Consultancy