Lunar XPrize Scorecard

The success of the original X Prize Foundation contest has led to a host of follow on X Prize contests in several different areas. One of these is the Lunar Challenge, which is jointly sponsored by the X Prize and Google. Michael Doornbos has started a scorecard to keep track of the 28 teams competing in the contest. You can see it here. He also has podcasts and other information on the site to learn more about the teams and their approach.
While these contests are motivating, I thought it was interesting what Tim Pickens said in this Wired magazine article about the prize money. He is a member of the Rocket City Space Pioneers team and helped build the craft that won the original X Prize in 2004.

“If you need the prize to make your team’s business work, you’re hosed. The prize money is an awesome consolation and a great way to recoup development costs, but it isn’t going to cover your mission costs. There are much, much less risky ways to make money. For the value of the prize versus the risk, you might as well be doing something else.”

Regulation, Geography, and Venture Capital

"We created innovation in this country, for job creation, and then we pulled out a gun and shot ourselves in both feet. If this continues, our children will not be doing the same work as we do. This situation has very serious consequences. It's all linked. If the system breaks, it will take a long time to replace it." --Paul Maeder

In this Red Herring interview with Paul Maeder, the chairman of the NVCA, he shares his thoughts on the current state of Venture Capital and the impact of Geography and Regulation. He sees New York, Boston and Silicon Valley as the innovation hubs and doesn't see a need for another one. He doesn't see how you could create a fourth, since the creation of these innovation hot spots is an organic, unscripted process.
Most interesting was his take on how Sarbanes Oxley has killed many companies' desire to go public. This makes Venture Capital much harder because the typical VC exit is through an IPO.

His observations make sense. You can regulate businesses out of existence. I hope those in D.C. are listening.
Read the whole interview here: http://redherring.com/Home/26526

Climbing the Backs of Giants

"if one is to stand on the shoulders of giants, one must first climb up their backs, and the greater the body of knowledge, the harder this climb becomes."

--Dr. Benjamin Jones, Kellog (Northwestern) School of Management

My Mom loves to tell a story about me in high school. As she remembers it, I came to her lamenting how difficult my classes were. Rather than provide a sympathetic ear, she pointed out that she faced similarly difficult classes and got A's thanks to her hard work. I supposedly responded that she had it so much easier because there was so much less to learn.

Turns out I was right! The burden of knowledge grows every year, and the study of innovation is now on that trajectory. Everywhere you look there is a new prize, a new approach. Someone claiming to have found the way to solve the messiness, the delays, and the financial chasms that seem to stand in the way of the next new drug, spaceship, or green tech. In addition, the management field has become more and more enamoured of innovation and entrepreneurship and there is an increasing body of work to understand if one is passionate about this area as I am.

My career involves sharing the best of this work, developing models to predict the most promising approaches, and using empirical analyses of natural experiments to see what is actually working. My hope is that this blog will be useful to those that are passionate about motivating innovation, whether practitioner, academic, or somewhere in between.

P.S. A working paper version of Dr. Jones' very interesting paper can be found here:

file://www.infoandina.org/system/files/recursos/56.jones.pdf