NSF innovation incentive prizes

RLV News provides a link about an innovation incentive prize program that Congress asked the NSF to investigate. A committee wrote a significant paper suggesting approaches NSF should take to implement the prize program. Here's the Executive Summary in PDF format. The initial suggested approach appears to be similar to NASA's Centennial Challenges. More comments on the paper appear in the RLV News comments. We will see what happens with the funding and implementation of this program, and whether or not it turns out to be a major part of the innovation incentive prize world.

The Intangible Economy blog has a post about this report, too. The blog also discusses innovation prizes, the Virgin Earth Challenge prize, and a prize for helping a mining company find gold. The ACM also has a summary of the report (at the bottom of the page), as well as notes on how the proposal is having trouble because of changes in Congress and this year's budget freeze. Page 3 of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale Research Matters report also has an update with a little politics thrown in.