Competition and Innovation:  A Paradox

A few weeks ago, while writing about Dan Pink’s great talk, we introduced a puzzle…and, well, we’re still thinking about it. Of course we’re not alone; the link between competition and innovation keeps a lot of economists (and organizational psychologists) busy—especially since innovation and competition don’t seem to go hand-in-hand in the way that many would expect.

In Pink’s talk, for instance, he discusses the surprising finding that creative thinking seems to be allergic to pay-for-performance type incentives (and by extension, we argued, competition).

From playing with Legos to investment policies: intuitions on competition

This struck us as intuitively right. Who wants to be distracted by the prospect of failure or ranking when solving a challenging problem? Think about the way kids are absorbed in play. Think about yourself playing Legos as a kid. Now imagine your performance at Legos if your mom offered to pay for the best construction after 45 minutes of “play.” The pleasure of total absorption in building something would have been lost.

It turns out that the dominant investment strategies for firms display a similiar aversion to competition.  There is an observed negative impact on innovation in highly competitive fields, since investments seem more risky in these contexts (this effect is mitigated slightly in the case where two firms are running “neck and neck”).  This means fewer firms enter a crowded field, and overall investments (viz., innovation) tend to be lower.

Counter evidence: Competition works. Or does it?

On the other hand, hypios is a platform for problem solving, and we always believed that competition, which is a necessary element of our process, could also benefit performance.  We’ve thought that some ranking mechanism for Solvers and institutions might increase the engagement of Solvers with both the Solver Network and the site. We also noticed that we were pretty lonely on the Internet in this approach. As we tried to show earlier, competition between users is all over the Internet, but people tend to omit this when talking or thinking about interactions on the web. “Collaboration” tends to be the magic word. When you read all this marveling about collaboration, it feels like competition was something that existed in a more archaic world, finally overcome by the forces of enlightenment in the New Economy. You might have guessed by now that we don’t think it’s that simple.

We’ve noted the success of programs like X Prize, which are built on the principle that an unsolved problem is comparable to a market failure: what’s required is a market-making mechanism (a large enough incentive prize) and an increase in the number of market entries (i.e. competitors). They also claim to have demonstrated not only that competition does not hurt innovation and performance, but that competitors will be so motivated by the X Prize “market” that they will invest significant amounts of their own money and time competing, making the prize money (whatever its sum) a relative deal.

Finally, we’ve argued that what typically goes by the name of “crowdsourcing” in the domain of problem solving—broadcasting a problem or question far and wide so as to reach the largest audience possible—is successful not because of the sheer number of participants, but because competition will effectively make the right solvers (with the right competencies) for the problem emerge out of the crowd.

If the last few points are right, then competition has not only a positive effect, but is the sine qua non for solving hard problems.  How can we make this square with the observed negative effects of competition?

Resolving the Competition Paradox

One of our team here at hypios came across a study (published as a Harvard working paper) by a familiar name: Karim Lakhani. Lakhani has already helped us think about why broadcasting problems works: the method is able to reach peripheral solvers—those solvers coming from outside the domain where the problem was first identified.  As relative outsiders, peripheral solvers are able to take diverse (and often surprising) approaches to the problem, increasing the probability of solving problems that are hard to tackle within a sector. (Insiders, on the other hand, tend to have a certain fixed outlook on the problem that prevents them from seeing it in a new light).

Lakhani’s new study advances the research by formulating and attempting to solve a version of the innovation/competition paradox.  He notes that even if some problems can only be solved by increasing competition, in light of empirical findings this increase in competition should lead (overall) to worse solver performance.  His study’s conclusion is that it’s less a paradox than a matter of designing a problem-solving situation that minimizes the negative “competition effect” and maximizes the positive “innovation effect” of increasing the number of solvers.

Lakhani notes that the negative competition effect is likely to predominate in cases where the challenge involves a solution that is known in advance.  In other cases, the relationship between competition and innovation is “richer” (i.e. not so clear).

Rational Solvers

If we think back to Pink’s “candle problem” (a cognitive challenge described in his talk), solvers did worse under incentive-prize conditions.  Paying for performance and ranking against peers led to worse performance in each case.  In light of Lakhani’s results, we can now hypothesize that this is because, for challenges like these, it is a matter of the solver hitting on a known strategy.  In these cases the negative competition effect is stronger because solvers, surmising that the problem has just one correct answer, and one right problem approach, become anxious and less motivated.  What if they don’t have the right answer? If there is a right answer, the person who already has it is most likely to win. It makes solving the problem a more linear game than if the solution is more multidimensional.  What kinds of problems, specifically, are we talking about when we talk about problems with one correct answer?  For starters, most things you’d find on a standardized tests, problems involving calculation, standard logic and programming etc.

In problems, where both the solution and, even more importantly, the problem approach, are unknown, competition has little to no overall negative effect and a solver can take a more playful stance on solving.

Lakhani et al suggest that for these types of problems, solvers are in a situation of “bounded rationality” with respect to the problem.  ”Bounded rationality” means that there are limits “in the ability of agents to know, calculate, formulate and predict outcomes.”  In this case, evidence indicates, solvers make what look like irrational decisions—over-investing in a competitive field that would otherwise look unattractive.  The study notes that this type of ‘irrationality’ mostly prevails in the case where problems are “complex or involve a large number of interdependent knowledge sets.”

Since the most important unknown in complex problems is which approach to take, it is “difficult to rank the capabilities and orientations of competing agents” in advance.  In this type of competitive context (for firms as for individuals) it becomes rational to judge that one’s possibility for winning and one’s “relevant expertise” are at least as good as the competition’s.  Surprisingly, hard problems involving more creativity level the playing field.

Conclusion

The less linear the foreseen process for solving a problem and the more creativity is involved in the process, the less competition becomes an issue for motivation. Competition seem to demotivate solvers mainly when the problem is simpler.

We’re interested in hearing your thoughts on what else makes for relevant differences between problems.

Image credit: ARCA

A week or so ago I mentioned the ongoing preparations of the Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA) to fly their balloon/rocket (or ‘rockoon’) system, as precursor to an attempt on the Google Lunar X-Prize. Well that attempt, at least, was unsuccessful, after the giant balloon failed to inflate fully. There is no word as yet as to when the next attempt will be.

Here.

Here is the on-board video of the second leg of the winning Masten LLC flight. It really brings to light how short the trip was and how long Xoie hovered to complete the 3 minutes. Also take note of the accuracy of the landing from this perspective.

Image credit: ARCA

The Nature blog reports that a Romanian Lunar X-Prize team will be launching their rather unusual rocket system, dubbed ‘Helen’,  any day now. Taking off from a ship in the Black Sea, ‘Helen’ uses a high-altitude balloon to lift a daisy-chained series of three rocket stages, which in turn will loft a small sub-orbital payload. The image above is taken from an animation of the flight, which you can watch here.

A NASA competition to stimulate commercial space projects has a winner — Masten Space Systems of California is being awarded the top $1 million prize for demonstrating a lunar lander. 

The race literally came down to the wire, reports the California-based X Prize Foundation, which oversaw the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge for NASA, part of the agency's Centennial Challenges program. 

Over the weekend, teams gathered in Mojave, Calif., for the last round of flights. The remote-controlled vehicles had to fly for at least three minutes and make precision touchdowns on rock-strewn landing pads at least 50 meters away. 

Masten was the underdog. Armadillo Aerospace of Texas had already won the first round of the competition last year and qualified for the top prize in September. 

Masten's Xoie rocket landed closer to the bull's eye than Armadillo's Scorpius, achieving an average landing accuracy of 19 cm compared to Armadillo's 87 cm. Armadillo, which is owned by id Software founder John Carmack, picks up a $500,000 second-place prize. 

Judges gave Masten an extra day to refly its rocket after a fire broke out and damaged the vehicle during its first attempt. That prompted a polite but pointed outcry from Carmack, who wrote:

"For the past couple weeks, as it became clear that Masten had a real shot at completing the Level 2 Lunar Lander Challenge and bettering our landing accuracy, I have been kicking myself for not taking the competition more seriously and working on a better landing accuracy.  If they pulled it off, I was prepared to congratulate them and give a bit of a sheepish mea culpa.  Nobody to be upset at except myself. We could have probably made a second flight in the drizzle on our scheduled days, and once we had the roll thruster issue sorted out, our landing accuracy would have been in the 20-centimeter range.  I never thought it was worth investing in differential RTK GPS systems [as Masten did], because it has no bearing on our commercial operations.

"The current situation, where Masten was allowed a third active day of competition, after trying and failing on both scheduled days, is different.  I don't hold anything against Masten for using an additional time window that has been offered, since we wouldn't have passed it up if we were in their situation, but I do think this was a mistake on the judges' part.

"I recognize that it is in the best interests of both the NASA Centennial Challenges department and the X Prize Foundation to award all the prize money this year, and that will likely have indirect benefits for us all in coming years.  It is probably also beneficial to the nascent New Space industry to get more money to Masten than Armadillo, since we have other resources to draw upon.  Permit me to be petty enough to be upset and bitter about a half-million dollars being taken from me and given to my competitor.

"The rules have given the judges the discretion to do just about anything up to and including awarding prize money for best effort if they felt it necessary, so there may not be any grounds to challenge this, but I do feel that we have been robbed.  I was going to argue that if Masten was allowed to take a window on an unscheduled day with no notice, the judges should come back to Texas on Sunday and let us take our unused second window to try for a better accuracy, but our FAA waiver for the LLC vehicle was only valid for the weekend of our scheduled attempt."

An awards ceremony is taking place this morning at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C. 

Masten Space Systems won a $1 million prize from NASA in a simulated lunar landing contest.  Simulating the maneuvers necessary to descend from lunar orbit and then return, teams in the contest had specific requirements for their robotic rockets.  Each rocket had to rise more than 160 feet, stay aloft for at least 180 seconds while traveling to a rocky landing pad, land, and then rise and fly back to the starting point.  Masten Space Systems entry was judged to have the most accurate landing of the competitors.

In a second, less demanding contest, Armadillo Aerospace won $350,000.  In that contest, entries only needed to stay aloft for 90 seconds of flight time.  For more information on the X Prize Contest, see the Scientific American.

Image credit: Ian Kluft (Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0)

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X-Prize Challenge drew to a close yeserday, with the top prize purse of $1 Million being awarded to Masten Space Systems. Their vehicle, nicknamed ‘Xoie’, completed Level 2 of the Challenge with an accuracy of 19 cm late last week. Second place Armadillo Aerospace took home $500,000 for their flight, which landed with an accuracy of 87 cm earlier in the competition.

The $10 million in winnings for the Automotive X Prize competition can provide a welcome influx of cash for the DIY garage-based team, startup or even a more established automaker that builds the best 100 MPG car with a minimum 200-mile range, based on a number of tests and road trials. Today the competition itself has scored some funding of its own, in the form of an up to $5.5 million award from the Department of Energy.

According to the DOE’s announcement this morning, the $5.5 million for the X Prize Foundation comes from the agency’s pot of stimulus funds, and will help expand education and outreach efforts for the competition nationwide. The DOE also plans to provide technical expertise “to ensure that each of the competition designs is reviewed correctly and consistently.”

This isn’t the first time Washington has gotten giddy over the green car contest, which requires teams to submit a viable business plan for building 10,000 cars. The Senate passed a resolution last year praising the foundation for helping “break the addiction of the United States to oil and stem the effects of climate change.”

The DOE also awarded a nearly $3.5 million grant last year to help with the education and outreach component. At the time, then-Assistant Secretary Andy Karsner called it “one important way the Bush administration is leveraging private sector expertise to educate and engage the public about utilizing clean, cutting-edge technologies to transform our transportation sector.”

The Obama administration’s DOE can use similar language with a bit more cred, having finally doled out funding under a long-delayed green car manufacturing loan program, raised the bar on fuel efficiency for cars, and just handed out some $33 million for cutting-edge green vehicle tech development, among other things. Announcing today’s award, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said, “This funding will support cutting-edge, American innovation that can help us fundamentally transform personal transportation and address the global climate crisis.”

To Armadillo, Masten Space Systems, Unreasonable Rocket, The X Prize foundation and all the people in these organization and others! I was watching the webcasts a large portion of the weekend.

A month ago, only one team, Armadillo, had ever done even a lunar lander challenge flight from one pad to another. And now there are three. Never mind multiple flights by Masten, both L1 and L2!

The future might be markedly different from present. How about something like testing space telescope instruments in 100+ km VTVL or HTHL flights? Reliable and routine access to space, even though at start for only a brief time in hops, could change everything. You would get everything back intact. Unlike with sounding rockets where recovery seems often so uncertain…

There are some aerodynamic issues still though that I’ve been expounding on for a long time.

Just in… The father son team of Unreasonable Rocket was just short of the L1 first leg requirements of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

Congratulation to the Breeds on a great flight. They ran out of fuel at 85 secs.

They will be trying for Level 2 tomorrow.

Watch the Live Broadcast here

Unreasonable Rocket Twitter

More LLC news:

Latest video from Armadillo – First boosted hop to 200m

UPDATE: Unreasonable Rockets Level 2 attempt rocket the Silver Ball suffered from a punctured tank and will not be flying.

Masten Space System joins Armadillo Aerospace in completion of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge Level 2!

Looks like Masten has now bumped Armadillo into 2nd place by having greater accuracy on the landings. First flight today had an accuracy of 28 cm and observers said that the second flight looked the same. This would beat the 89cm of Armadillo.

Incredible flight control and an overall beautiful flights.

Unreasonable Rocket will be trying later today for Level 1 and Level 2 possibly tomorrow.

Unreasonable Rocket Twitter

Masten Twitter

Nice thorough article over at MSNBC

Unreasonable Rocket's Blue Ball

Unreasonable Rocket will be making it’s attempt for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge today. The vehicle is known as the Blue Ball.

They will be following Masten Space Systems as they make another attempt today after yesterday’s 1st flight and small fire. The judges ruled they will get another chance today.

Masten will begin their final attempt on Friday, October 30, 2009 at approximately 9am PT/16:00 UTC

Unreasonable Rocket are scheduled to start their window at 1pm PT/20:00 UTC. They will try to webcast that attempt as well.

Watch the Live Broadcast here

Unreasonable Rocket Twitter

Masten Twitter

Good Luck to both teams!!!

Dysfunctional Incentives?

Former Al Gore speechwriter turned business-world bestseller, Dan Pink recently gave an excellent 19 minutes talk at TED2009.   (For those of you not familiar with TED, hasten to their website—it offers an extensive video archive of important contemporary thinkers on technology, design and innovation).

In this talk, Pink tells us that most of our ideas about what motivates performance are wrong—or at least not well-adapted to important tasks of our times. His main point: our beliefs about incentives come from attempts to motivate tasks that we no longer do.

The mechanical, rule-following tasks of the 20th century have been replaced by those requiring open-ended, creative thinking.  For creative tasks, contingent incentives (if you do X, you will get Y), have a negative impact on performance.

Correlatively, studies show a negative effect with the addition of a competitive element to a “task environment”.  A contingent-reward structure often involves setting a solver against his or her peers performing similiar tasks (only some of them will get Y for doing X).

Pink highlights two studies which clarify the interdependence of contingent reward and competition.  In one experiment, participants are asked to complete a challenging cognitive task, i.e. to solve it, participants need to operate what can be called a change of a perspective, (“the candle problem”). They are divided into two groups.  One group is told that their work will be used to set a “norm” or performance median.  The other group is told that they will be timed and rewarded according to their performance (relative to their peers).  Not only did the norm-setting group do better at their task than the pay-for-performance group, but the more that was on the line (in terms of reward), the worse participants performed the task.  When the task was slightly changed, implying less creativity and more mechanical behavior (what Pink calls “the candle problem for dummies”) contingent incentives do work.  Study after study appear to corroborate this evidence.

Pink does not spend too much time speculating on why contingent rewards would have this effect.  Instead he uses his time to discuss the lessons we ought to learn from this research: pay incentives don’t work when tasks are cognitively challenging;  people do better in less competitive, more autonomous environments. So whereas payment is the best incentive for mechanical tasks like those performed on mturk, payment alone would not seem the best motivation for more complex tasks like those performed on hypios. There has to be some intrinsic motivation: Solvers have to  feel like solving problems “for their own sake” is rewarding.

I think Pink is largely right.  In fact, the work environment he describes, ROWE (results-only work environment)—which allows for relative work autonomy—is what we’ve adopted here at hypios.  What I’d like to do here is to speculate a little about why solvers might have reacted in the way that they did in the experiments and try to show that we shouldn’t be too quick to draw conclusions about the efficacy of either financial incentives or competition in general.

The Creativity Jam

Pink focuses on what he calls contingent incentives.  Studies that Pink cites show that an incentive tied directly to the outcome of a single (timed) task cause worse performance for cognitive tasks.

Studies have also found that setting specific and difficult goals significantly increases solver performance even when the goals are out of reach.  These same studies have found that, in the context of these specific and difficult goals, adding competition hurts performance when competition comes in the form of measurement against peers in view of reward.  Correlatively, studies have shown that cooperative environments were superior to competive ones for enhancing task performance.

So it appears that competition and contingent reward work together to jam creative thought, at least under conditions where the reward was directly tied to the performance of a specific task.  You might say that together they seem to create a virtual axe over your head, which is counter productive to creative results. Working in an autonomous environment where you set your own specific goals is most conducive to them.  What none of these studies have shown (and they acknowledge this) is what happens when competition and incentives are on the horizon of an activity rather than directly tied to it.

Challenging Pink:  Not all competition is zero-sum

If Pink is right, why do prize competitions—competitions that involve pay for winning performance—like the Netflix prize seem to work so well as creative-solution generators?  Does offering payment for solution (as hypios does) discourage or “de-motivate” solvers?  Can’t a little friendly competition (against a rival institution, say) be an added driver (even if it may not be as important as collaboration with peers)?

Pink is surely right when he says that intrinsic motivation (say, finding a task interesting) is more important than most anything else when it comes to the performance of high-level cognitive tasks.  But it is hard to imagine an intrinsically motivating task withdrawn from a horizon of competition and reward.  What makes it worth doing is exactly what makes it valuable to others.  There will always be rewards (in the form of glory and gold) and competition for any genuinely worthwhile task.  And people often (though by no means exclusively) get clues about what tasks are worthwhile from the array of incentives that surround a given task-environment.  How can we put these sorts of intuitions together with the finding that Pink highlights in his talk?

Just as in economic theory, the price of something is thought of as a signal sending a message to a consumer or producer: financial incentives send messages that something has value for a seeker and even for a society as a whole.  As such they focus attention on certain types of problems, issues, tasks, marking certian ones as valuable.  Indeed, the X Prize foundation, which runs prize competitions with purses exceeding 1o million USD, uses these large sums to counteract what they see as a market failure, to signal attention to a series of goals that they see as undervalorized (by the market) but that they have identified as key for social advanacement.  If there is only one winner, this does not seem to discourage pariticpants nor limit personal investment in pursuit of the prize.

The Ansari X prize, promoting civilian space travel, had dozens of participants investing millions of their own funds in pursuit of the goal.  This is because the competition is not viewed as a zero-sum game.  Competitors gain from the competition in terms of early entry into a promising market, experience and technology exposure.  Here the award money structures the horizon, but is not linked to strategy development nor to the completion of individual tasks.  How a solver gets to the winning solution is set by that solver or team, and not prescribed by a carrot-wielding outsider with a stopwatch.

Now let’s think a little more about competition.  Is collaboration really the only game in town?  I would say (and for reasons that Pink is willing to call “ideological” and “lazy”) collaboration has traditionally gotten short shrift.  But, there’s evidence from studies of  organizational competition that show that organizations that are “neck to neck’” spur innovation.   In the Netflix competition we saw two teams—agglomerations of single players and smaller teams—that were, in the end, competing neck-and-neck.  Neither the competitive element nor the prize money ($1 million) seemed to create a dysfunctional task environment among the leaders.

Let me offer a  reason why.   Netflix created something called a leaderboard, which showed the performance of all pariticpants and thus allowed participants to gauge their performance against their peers in relative “real time.”  In the cited studies (and in many real “task environments”) participants are in the dark about others’ performance, causing them to feel a loss of control and autonomy with respect to their task.

In the Netflix case, the reward was tied to a specific and challenging goal (10% increase in the quality of the algorithm) and contest rules made it so that teams were given time to match or catch up with the winning team.  Basically, this mimics the information that rival firms would get about their competition in a more or less free market.  Now it’s important to not generalize (as I’ve been doing) too quickly between the response of  individuals and teams in a task environment.  This deserves much more study.

Pink points us towards some very important insights into the nature of motivation.  Financial incentives not only cannot replace intrinsic motivation, they can acutally inhibit it.  Intrinsic motivation, which comes from internal values and goals matching external problems and tasks, is decreased when factors of reward and punishment change the task environment and make the participant feel like they are no longer in control of the situation.  With the solver in control, goal, guts, glory and gold all factor into what challenges he or she will take up.  Watch Pink’s video (if you feel motivated to do so) and then let us know your thoughts. We promise, we won’t pay you for it

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La gara, riservata ai veicoli ad alta efficienza e basse emissioni, avrà luogo in primavera negli Stati Uniti. In palio 10 milioni di dollari. Cerimonia di premiazione alla Casa Bianca.

Torino, 19 ottobre 2009

E’ il team TTW Italia – di Actua S.r.l. azienda laboratorio di creatività ingegneristica e innovazione, spin-off del Politecnico di Torino – con il suo veicolo TTW One, l’unico team italiano che prenderà parte al Progressive Automotive X PRIZE, la competizione internazionale organizzata dalla X Prize Foundation, riservata a veicoli  ad alta efficienza e basse emissioni che ha come obiettivo quello di ispirare una nuova generazione di veicoli altamente efficienti in grado di essere prodotti in serie e di offrire concretamente ai consumatori una valida alternativa ai mezzi di trasporto privato attualmente disponibili sul mercato.

L’elenco ufficiale dei partecipanti ammessi alla competizione è stato ufficializzato pochi minuti fa a New York presso il Classic Car Club di Manhattan, nel corso di una conferenza stampa nella quale sono intervenuti Glenn Renwick, Presidente e Amministratore delegato del Progressive Insurance e Peter Diamandis, Presidente della X PRIZE Foundation, presenti i giornalisti delle principali testate internazionali.

Sono 43 i team che parteciperanno alla gara con 53 veicoli – selezionati fra oltre 97 candidature – provenienti da 10 paesi del mondo – tra cui Canada, Cina, Germania, Gran Bretagna, Stati Uniti e Paesi Bassi –  con TTW a rappresentare l’Italia.

La competizione, con un montepremi complessivo di 10 milioni di dollari, avrà luogo negli Stati Uniti a partire da maggio 2010 e si snoderà attraverso un percorso a tappe che toccherà Michigan, Ohio e Illinois, concludendosi con la cerimonia di premiazione, prevista per settembre a Washington D.C. alla Casa Bianca, in omaggio alla convinta politica di innovazione in campo autoveicolistico e ambientale del Presidente Barack Obama.

La Fundación X PRIZE se ha propuesto promover la innovación con beneficio social a partir de la convocatoria de premios que motiven la resolución de desafíos de largo alcance. Afirman creer que la iniciativa de un pequeño grupo de personas muy apasionadas pueden alcanzar logros inimaginables que nos beneficien a todos. Hasta la fecha han planteado premios sobre el genoma, o sobre vehículos con combustibles ecológicos, etc. Por cierto, su filosofía tiene muchos que ver con el proyecto “Premio de la innovación”, desarrollado por el iTALDE Empresa, que lidera Alejandro Echevarría, dentro del Consejo de Promoción y Comunicación de Innobasque.

En esta ocasión el premio que X-Prize convoca es el denominado Google Lunar X-Prize. ¿Qué pinta Google en todo esto? ¡Ah, me había olvidado de comentar quienes componen esta fundación, que pilota BT! Pero como podéis comprobar en la imagen que se adjunta, aparecen otros nombres también muy conocidos dentro de la categoría de patrocinadores, que ellos denominan, de forma muy sugerente, “Vision Circle”:

¿En qué consiste Google Lunar X-Prize? En conseguir enviar una nave a la Luna, que esta consiga alunizar, que salga un vehículo y recorra por lo menos 500 metros, y que transmita a la Tierra imágenes y vídeos en alta definición. Quien primero lo consiga se hará con los 20 millones de dólares del premio. El segundo se llevaría 5 millones.

Hay una fecha límite para transmitir las imágenes: el 31 de diciembre del 2012. Si pasada esa fecha ningún equipo ha logrado el objetivo, la competición se prolongaría hasta el 31 de diciembre del 2014, aunque el premio se reduciría a 15 millones de dólares. Aquí un vídeo que explica la competición:

Ya hay 21 equipos inscritos en la competición, de más diez países como Estados Unidos, China o Alemania, pero también aparecen en la lista otros equipos de países con escasa tradición en el sector, como Malasia o Rumanía y Catalunya, que han formado un equipo denominado Catalonia Moon Discovery Group, al frente del cual está Xavier Claramunt, un innovador extremo que tuvimos la oportunidad de conocer en el acto de inauguración del Año de la Innovación y la Creatividad. Xavier  está convencido de que pueden conseguirlo, pero afirma que necesitarán 50 millones de dólares para llevar a cabo este proyecto.

Las bases de la competición establecen que las misiones deben estar financiadas por capital privado por lo menos en un 90%.  La solución que plantea Catalonia Moon Discovery Group es que se puedan obtener deducciones fiscales si se patrocina la misión. Deducciones como las que se solicitan ya se aplican a quienes patrocinan competiciones deportivas como la Barcelona World Race o la Alicante Vuelta al Mundo a vela. “Bonificaciones que permiten recuperar el 90% de las inversiones”, según afirman los promotores del consorcio. Ahora bien estas deducciones fiscales están sometidas a una aprobación expresa del Congreso de los Diputados, por lo que los promotores han presentado una petición a los diputados del PSC, CiU y ERC para que la defiendan.

Está claro que el cuello de botella de la competición parece ser la financiación, e incluso la crítica por el elevado coste del proyecto, especialmente en un contexto como el actual. ¿Para qué invertir tanto dinero? Quizá la historia nos proporcione otro punto de vista. Recordemos como en 1919 Raymond Orteig, un rico hotelero francés, ofreció 25.000 dólares a quien realizara el primer vuelo directo entre Nueva York y París. Y en 1927 el polémico aviador Charles Lindbergh lo ganó, contra todo pronóstico, con un avión llamado Spirit of St. Louis, que tardó 33 horas y 32 minutos en sobrevolar 3.600 millas. Entonces, nueve equipos gastaron 400.000 dólares para conseguir este premio de 25.000 dólares. Este proyecto hizo que entre 1926 y 1929 se disparara el número de pasajeros de las líneas aéreas norteamericanas, y que aumentaran un 300% las demandas de licencias de piloto.

Es el mismo argumento que utiliza Xavier Claramunt, los 50 millones de dólares servirán no tanto para ganar el premio como para estimular el sector aeroespacial.

Y uniendo cables, es donde me surge a mí la duda de si nuestro singular marco fiscal nos permitiría desarrollar una operación similar.

Se quejaba hace unos días Mariano Ferrer en un debate de Plató 2.0 de que no aprovechamos las posibilidades de la autonomía fiscal, los “cómos” decía él. No creo que pensara en proyectos como este, pero me pregunto qué sucedería si en Hegan (nuestro Cluster Aeroespacial), o en alguna de sus empresas (pienso en  algunas como Sener, o Aernnova o …) se plantearan participar en esta competición, ¿podríamos utilizar nuestro régimen fiscal para facilitarlo?

Supongo que preguntas como estas son las que se plantean en el iTALDE de Marco fiscal favorable a la innovación. Y yendo un poco más lejos, ¿qué ocurriría si se hiciera un consorcio vasco-catalán aprovechando las oportunidades de nuestra autonomía fiscal? ¿Y por qué no?

Mit insgesamt zwei Millionen Dollar ist die Lunar Lander Challenge dotiert, die die X Prize Foundation im Auftrag der Nasa veranstaltet. (Grafik: X Prize Foundation)

Wettbewerbe sind derzeit in der Raumfahrtbranche groß in Mode. Seit im Oktober 2004 der mit zehn Millionen Dollar dotierte X-Prize für den ersten bemannten Privatflug ins All ausgeschüttet wurde – und gleichzeitig den Startschuss für den Weltraumtourismus gab – sind Preisgelder für alle möglichen Aktivitäten ausgesetzt: für Mond-Rover, für Weltraumaufzüge, für drahtlose Stromübertragung. Seit wenigen Tagen steht fest: Das Preisgeld für die erste in privater Regie gebaute Mondlandefähre wird die Nasa in diesem Jahr auf jeden Fall los.

Am 12. September absolvierte Scorpuis, eine vom texanischen Unternehmen Armadillo Aerospace entwickelte Fähre, souverän die Anforderungen der “Lunar Lander Challenge”. Der ferngesteuerte Prototyp startete senkrecht in mehr als 50 Meter Höhe, flog vertikal zu einer 50 Meter entfernten Landeplattform, deren Oberfläche dem Mond nachempfunden war, und setzte dort nach gut drei Minuten Flugzeit mehr oder minder sanft auf – wie das Video des Fluges beweist:

Nach einem kurzen Tankstopp ging es auf dem umgekehrten Weg zurück. Die Fähre ist übrigens um einiges größer als sie auf den ersten Blick erscheint. Deutlich wird das gegen Ende des Videos, wenn nach erfolgreicher Landung der nette Mann mit dem Feuerlöscher kommt.

Vollgetankt wiegt das Vehikel auf der Erde gut 850 Kilogramm. Gut sichtbar ist auch, wie die Steuerdüse ständig korrigieren muss, während die eigentliche Fähre kaum hin und her wackelt.

Auch wenn die Texaner die Ersten waren, denen die simulierte Mondlandung gelungen ist, können sie den mit einer Million Dollar dotierten Hauptpreis der Lunar Lander Challenge noch nicht fest verplanen. Zwei weitere Unternehmen, Masten Space Systems und Unreasonable Rocket, wollen in den kommenden Wochen nachziehen. Absolvieren die beiden ebenfalls die gestellten Aufgaben, wird entscheidend sein, wer sich genauer an die fliegerischen Vorgaben gehalten hat.

BrightSight Group speaker and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis is featured in Wired Magazine’s article, Inside the X Prize. From the article, “Diamandis now wants to take the X Prize into even more uncharted frontiers. The Progressive Automotive X Prize seeks to revolutionise the roads. The Archon Genomics X Prize hopes to advance the field of personal medicine by awarding $10 million to the team that sequences 100 human genomes in ten days at a cost of less than $10,000 per genome. The Google Lunar X Prize seeks to take us even farther into space, and to get us there will shell out $30 million to the first team to land a robot successfully on the Moon.”

The Problem With MPGs: The folks behind the Automotive X Prize lay the smack down on General Motors’ 230 MPG claim for the Chevy Volt, and make the case for their MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent) method of calculating the fuel efficiency of plug-in vehicles. — Autotmotive X Prize Blog via AutoblogGreen

Move Over, Prius: Toyota reportedly plans to introduce a new medium-sized hybrid sedan called the SAI, priced somewhere between the Prius and the Lexus HS 250h, this year. — Green Car Congress

Tug o’ War Over Clean Energy Bank: “One of the most excellent pieces of the climate bill now awaiting defenestration at the hands Senate Blue Dogs is its creation of a Clean Energy Bank that would help finance nascent clean energy projects…Naturally, conservatives are now coming out in opposition to the bank.” — Grist

Lockheed on the Grid: “Global defense contractor Lockheed Martin is teaming with Black & Veatch, a major construction and consulting company, to offer utilities a suite of products they can use to improve their smart grid implementations.” — VentureBeat’s GreenBeat

China’s EV Power Play: In a profile of electric car startup Coda Automotive, Bryan Walsh argues, “If automakers in the U.S. and elsewhere aren’t worried about losing the race for the next great technology to the Chinese, they should be.” Time

by Terry Burton, Digital Media Coordinator

Are you ready to be part of the next race to the Moon? Last Wednesday, the X PRIZE Foundation, Google Inc., LEGO Systems, National Instruments, and Wired’s GeekDad announced “MoonBots: A Google Lunar X PRIZE LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Challenge” at National Instruments NIWeek 2009. This new contest challenges small teams, made up of children and adults, to design, program, and construct robots that perform simulated lunar missions similar to those required to win the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Sounds intriguing! You can go to the MoonBots website to sign up to be notified by email when the competition begins. If you’re on Facebook, you can also find them there.

Lincvolt Bows Out of X Prize Competition: Neil Young’s biodiesel/gasoline/hydroxy gas-powered Lincvolt has withdrawn from the race to focus on developing technology without the distraction of devising a business model (an X Prize requirement). — Lincvolt via AutoblogGreen

Small Wind, Coming Soon to the Hardware Store: Startup WindTronics has struck a deal to distribute its small wind turbines through Ace Hardware starting this fall. — CNET’s Green Tech

Feds Unlock Cash for Biofuel Feedstocks: Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and USDA Chief Tom Vilsack announced today awards of up to $6.3 million for seven projects researching genomics-enabled improvements in plant feedstocks for biofuel production. — DOE

Q&A With GE Global Research Chief: General Electric (s GE) is pushing the smart grid and thin-film solar, but don’t expect new kinds of nuclear reactors, says Mark Little, head of the company’s $6 billion-a-year R&D effort. — MIT’s Technology Review

On the Range: A new electric concept car developed by Lotus Engineering, with a top speed of 65 MPH and a baseline range of 31 miles that can be increased with additional batteries, represents a shift in thinking from “range anxiety” to “range awareness” — Wired’s Autopia

Why might a highly public competition, a “Grand Challenge,” precipitate green innovations that might not otherwise occur via more conventional pathways like through capital markets, internal R&D, government R&D, and regulation?

Eric Cahill, Senior Director, Progressive Automotive X PRIZE asks this question (and presumably answers it too) at the upcoming MIT Conference on Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges. Green innovation in the automotive industry is frequently hampered by complex policy challenges and the difficulty of making politically unpopular policy decisions. The following is an extract from Cahill’s abstract for the conference:

“Markets routinely fail to appropriately value social goods, such as healthy air, and to penalize those who degrade it. In such instances, governments rely on policy instruments to address the imbalance. Some policies are informed by systems analysis, others less so (think ethanol subsidies). The most effective policy interventions, such as a simple carbon tax, are often politically unpalatable. Even worse, what might emerge as sound systems-based policy is often distorted in its implementation by the political process. The end product is a Rube Goldberg construct rife with loopholes that ultimately fail to achieve the desired outcome at best or at worst, spawn unintended consequences that do more harm than good (think CAFE standards).”

The question asked here is “can big-ticket events such as the automotive X PRIZE spur innovation that transcends/ circumvents these difficulties”? In “Systems Thinking” terms, is this a variable with the potential to alter the feedback mechanisms? Or are these things just a lot of hype and hoopla, where someone walks away with a $10 million prize and everyone else goes back to business as usual? To be fair, a lot of cutting edge innovations and hugely successful products of today were actually built by the winners of such competitions, including the MIT $100K competition (think Akamai, Harmonix, Hubspot). On the other hand, a whole lot of them just ended up being damp squibs (too numerous to mention), after getting a lot of press and publicity and a big dollar award. In my personal view, with the magnitude of difficulties that the auto industry is facing, we need to pool the brains of all big and small innovators out there. If some of them walk away with a million dollar prize, why not?