Approaches to Innovation in Green Energy
Besides just harnessing the innovation that can help solve the problem, we need to engage the public so that they do their part—whether that be making simple lifestyle changes, using their purchasing power to demand the solutions are successful in the market, or even contributing to the portfolio of solutions by creating their own.
Environmental challenges are vast, and significant investment is needed to develop and implement a portfolio of solutions. Currently, the market is just not investing enough in these solutions because it has not been required or incentivized to deal with the impact of the problems it creates. With a lack of serious interest from the market to make a change, other organizations need to step in to:
1) Make the world aware of the problem so the market may be forced or may choose to act, and
2) Provide the seed funding to incentivize the development of solutions and get them to market.
No single organization or group of organizations could provide the capital necessary to solve the entire problem. Organizations need to leverage their limited resources – time and money – to have the biggest impact on environmental problems by incentivizing global innovation. But, when facing innovation challenges such as these, the natural tendency is to look to the known players to come up with creative solutions. But in a world of exponentially growing problems, our traditional problem-solving methodologies are not enough. This talk will focus on using incentive challenges as one tool to spur innovation to solve our environmental challenges by using the power of the global crowd. This talk will share the history of prizes, prize theory, what makes a good prize, and a few case studies.