Prize Competitions vs. Ideation Events

Great post on the Hypios blog where they reference a Ted Talk by Dan Pink. The talk focuses on motivating creativity (what incentives work and don't work).



Several very interesting conclusions:

* financial incentives are merely one source of motivation and, furthermore, can actually de-motivate the participants in certain circumstances
* not all innovation-driven efforts need to be zero-sum; prize competitions such as the X-Prize or Netflix prize appear on the surface to be zero-sum - there are clear winners and losers; however if you talk to any of the finalists for the Netflix Prize you'll learn that they derived significant benefit from simply participating
* the presence of a leaderboard in the Netflix competition was actually not demotivating - it gave all the participants a clear idea of where they stood in the competition and helped motivate them to do better

It is precisely these motivating factors that will drive the success of the DiscoveryCast Ideation Events. And we've added a few new wrinkles of our own.

We have developed several key features that focus on the participants intrinsic motivations: working on an interesting challenge, establishing your reputation by the quality of ideas you share, and reward (points system) & recognition (participants can level-up to higher rankings based on their ideas). We even hide the participants identities in order to create a level playing field. We also let participants build/comment/question other ideas.  And finally, we provide no financial incentives in our business model.