MGT/411

INNOVATIVE AND CREATIVE BUSINESS THINKING

Prizes with an Eye Toward the Future

This is an old but still in use idea to get people to innovate. The idea is tom offer money, or some king of compensation to solve problems. Another model combines smaller prizes for promising ideas with big prizes for success. The Gates foundation offers a $100,000 grant for help in solving help problems.

There is now marketplace where hundreds of companies post problems and a reward amount, and 250,000 solvers around the world get to work. A study also found that expertise in the field of the problem actually hurt a solver’s chances. “The further the problem from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they are to solve it.”

For innovators there is a rare tend in medicine because if the condition being researched is rare, there will be little money for research and less money for the innovators to find a cure. There will be less money to solve problems for rare conditions. This is a problem that needs to be solved.

Another item happens in the patent system. Monopoly control can limit access to a new product.    Especially when an innovation is in the public interest, it’s counterproductive to encourage the patent holder to price it out of range of most users.

Rosemberg, T. (2012). Prizes with an eye toward the future. Retrieved from Rosemberg  "Prizes can help, as they reward innovation without monopoly control.  The World Health Organization is currently studying the use of prizes to stimulate medical discovery.  In the United States, the idea’s champion is the quixotic Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont.   One of Sanders’ proposal would create a Medical Innovation Prize Fund, which would offer more than $80 billion a year in prizes to drugs that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration, a far bigger pot for drug makers than in previous discussions of the idea.   The prize would replace the monopoly control that currently rewards pharmaceutical companies generic competition would begin immediately.  Sanders claims the fund would create $250 billion in savings annually by bringing down drug prices”.

Change Management 101: How Businesses Win With Innovation

Companies need to successfully address and adapt to strategic innovation requires implementing a culture of participation, not necessarily the type of culture built into most Industrial Age organizations. It is key to remember that executives, managers and front line employees infrequently have worry noticing evolving innovations. More often, troubles mount their ability to effectively converse these opportunities and challenges to higher management, and obtain the organizational buy-in needed to rapidly and concisely respond to these potential threats.

Decision makers need to make decisions, even if they don't have correct information. Even the utmost successful organizations and managers in the world are seldom 100 percent sure how results will play out, and occasionally, they're even aware that first efforts may well be catastrophic.

For business leader, to succeed, it is important to reason of change management as a constant, not infrequent, activity that should be ingrained in any enterprise from day one.

Leaders have to give themselves permission to speak up and allow others within the organization authorization to do so. Don't allow employees to keep quiet, or keep their heads down, inspire the contributions and insights. And when all's said and done with an initiative, don't worry if it isn't perfect, instead, ship your product or venture and see what happens, iterating as you go.

The Prize Fund for HIV/AIDS

According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 33 million persons living with HIV worldwide. Globally, the frequency of new infections is estimated to be about 7 thousand persons per day, or 2.5 million per year. More than 90 percent of persons who are HIV+ live in emerging countries.

Governments must to address the rising prices of AIDS cure. The United States is now spending on average more than $9 thousand yearly on antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for each of the 1 million people active with HIV in the United States, a number that would be far greater if a larger percentage of persons living with HIV were receiving treatment or taking innovative drugs.

The challenges of dealing with drug opposition, new contaminations, extraordinary prices and aggressive price upsurges, have together added to a main crisis in terms of access and the sustainability of access to new drugs for HIV/AIDS. This crisis affects more than a million people in the United States and tens of millions of people worldwide. It is essential to search new ways of successfully dealing with the extraordinary cost of new drugs, while ensuring vigorous innovation for new treatments.

The prizes for innovation would be deliver by the new Prize Fund for HIV/AIDS that would be funded at 0.0002 of the gross domestic product of the United States, an quantity equal to more than $3 billion per year at current levels of GDP.

First, the legislation eliminates all legal monopolies on the sale of eligible products for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, making it possible to buy low-priced generic versions from competitive providers. Competition is anticipated to lower the cost of drugs by more than $7 billion per year for the U.S. domestic market, with the saving shared by health insurers and patients.

Internal processes have to be in place to get the company to the next level. Most of these processes rely on grants and money to get innovators to come up with ideas to resolve trending problems. These innovators have solve big company problems with less money and with better results because they get paid only if the problem is solved.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/prizes-with-an-eye-toward-the-future/

http://keionline.org/prizes/cites