Accelerating innovation with prize rewards: History and typology of technology prizes and a new contest design for innovation in African agriculture

Benoit Delbecq () and William Masters

No 835, IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: "This paper describes how governments and philanthropic donors could drive innovation through a new kind of technology contest. We begin by reviewing the history of technology prizes, which operate alongside private intellectual property rights and public R&D to accelerate and guide productivity growth towards otherwise-neglected social goals. Proportional “prize rewards” would modify the traditional winner-take-all approach, by dividing available funds among multiple winners in proportion to measured achievement. This approach would provide a royalty-like payment for incremental success. The paper provides concludes with a specific example for how such prizes could be implemented to reward and help scale up successful innovations in African agriculture, through payments to innovators in proportion to the value created by their technologies after adoption. " from authors' abstract

Keywords: Productivity growth; Technology adoption; intellectual property; Agricultural R&D; Innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-eff, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/ifpridp00835.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:ifprid:835

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().