Research

While prizes have been around for centuries, our understanding of how and why they work is still quite limited.  The X PRIZE Lab@MIT aims to contribute a deeper understanding of the benefits and challenges of incentivized competition, and to utilize the field of such competition as a natural laboratory for exploring the process of innovation.

Support for this research comes from the X PRIZE Foundation, MIT Energy Initiative, and Doris Duke Foundation.

Selected conferences and publications:

Wagner EB (2010) Prizes for progress: How crowdsourced competitions incentivize innovation. HASTAC 2010: Grand Challenges and Global Innovations Conference. 15-17 April 2010.  http://www.hastac.org/events/hastac-2010-grand-challenges-and-global-innovations-conference.

Bhushan B (2010)  The incentives and disincentives of innovation prizes: A survey of the dropout teams from Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE. S.M. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Knight KJ, Cunio PM, Kwan JD, Bhushan B, Wagner EB  (2010) Prizes for Energy Innovation: Incentives for Today's Challenges. A white paper by the X PRIZE Lab@MIT for the Doris Duke Foundation. http://web.mit.edu/ipc/research/energy/pdf/EIP_10-001.pdf .

Jordan N, Wagner EB  (2010) Prizes as a Tool for Engaging Researchers and Students. Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, Boulder, CO. 18-20 February 2010.  http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/nsrc2010 .