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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Anyone capable of making the "next penicillin" or "a carbon-free plane" is going to do so without the need for a £1m prize. The implementation would make them hundreds of times more.

£1m is 0.00014% of the UK government's annual budget. This sort of "motivation" is nothing more than a ridiculous platitude that enables the government to pretend they're supporting technology and innovation with practically no cost to them. Frankly, it's an insult to anyone remotely entrepreneurial. 100 prizes of £10,000 would very likely do a lot more for industry, encourage people to get behind something imaginative, and perhaps would be enough of a start to someone who could eventually solve one of these problems.

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It's the capitalist mindset - capitalism is based upon the idea that money is a universal motivator. The idea that people can be productive for other reasons, such as pride, passion, joy, or compassion, is incompatible and would lead to the idea that systems other than capitalism could be successful on a grand scale.

The point (as I read it) isn't that money is not a good motivator. However, if you are talking about something like the next penicillin, then your potential to monetize dwarfs the million dollar reward. That money would be better spent to incentive things that would not otherwise make the person rich.

This is a publicity stunt sure.

But a lot of people develop amazing things that make a lot of money, without actually benefiting from that money.

For instance, if you work for GSK, and lead a team that discovers the next Penicillin, GSK makes a lot of money. Your pay goes from 100K per year to 200K per year, and you get a big promotion. But you don't get a true share of the reward, because you did not truly share the risk (GSK funded a lot of projects that did not work out).

Similarly, someone working in Academia as an employee might make a brilliant discovery. The organization would get the license money, and they would be able to get a cushy tenured professor job wherever they liked. But they wouldn't get a true share of the reward.

Amazing discoveries are likely to be made by an employee, because large organizations are able to fund high risk/high reward projects. I think it's important, even as a token gesture, to reward them for being lucky enough to get results.

No, prices are not stupid. You didn't think through the whole problem.

The issue of cost and incentive with this kind of revolutionary innovation is real. The problem is simple. When you innovate, you bear alone the fixed cost of development while your competitors can copy and bear only the marginal cost. That's the reason the patent system exists and normally that's fine.

But, for a revolutionary invention, patents might not be feasible. Imagine you find a cure to cancer. Do you really think every governments and public opinion are going to let you be the sole producer for 30 years while people are dying ? Impossible. This creates a disincentive to push money towards a cure for private investor. Now, the idea behind a price is that if you find the cure, the price is going to cover your fixed cost (ideally more) thus investing is competitive again. Technically, as it fosters competition and you will only reimburse the finder, it supposed to generate more research than just spending the price money. Putting money aside for this kind of price was one of the main goal of the Bill and Monica Gates Foundation when it was founded (I think, they went back a bit because people wrongly assume its wasted money).

>Imagine you find a cure to cancer. Do you really think every governments and public opinion are going to let you be the sole producer for 30 years while people are dying ?

Isn't this the way medical patents work currently?

You are right. But the problem that institutions face is that as the sums of money gets smaller, the relative cost of doing due diligence on the idea/team gets significantly larger.

It's almost as if he's looking to be able to claim he's driving innovation in the face of any real growth policy and grab a few cheap headlines in the process.

But that couldn't be it, could it?

Of course they wouldn't do something like, certainly not after the rip-roaring success of the TechCity initiative.

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