By Eric Hintz
The Wall Street Journal
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To understand the history of innovation over the past several centuries, it helps to remember a familiar refrain: Follow the money.
Earlier this month, for instance, three teams shared the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize—a $10 million bounty awarded for the first production-ready car that can achieve a fuel efficiency of 100 miles per gallon or its energy equivalent.
The contest was one of a growing portfolio of competitions managed by the X Prize Foundation, a 15-year-old nonprofit organization that partners with philanthropists and corporations to stimulate technological breakthroughs by sponsoring high-stakes challenges. The foundation is also co-sponsoring the Archon Genomics X Prize—which will pay $10 million for reaching certain targets in high-speed, low-cost gene sequencing—and the Google Lunar X prize, which will pay $30 million to the first privately funded team to land a rover on the moon.
These contests may seem like a recent fad, but in fact, they have a long history. In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering awards to inventors who could solve the problem of measuring longitude at sea; from 1737 to 1765, clockmaker John Harrison earned a series of awards totaling £14,315 for improvements to his marine chronometer. In 1800, the French government established the Food Preservation Prize to help supply Napoleon’s army, and 10 years later, Nicolas Appert claimed 12,000 francs for demonstrating his vacuum-packing method, which is still used in today’s canned foods.
After disappearing for much of the 20th century, such prizes have recently re-emerged as a strategy for stimulating innovation. And that resurgence says much about the nature of innovation today, as well as the economic times we live in.
