Science Policy Research Report: The Use of Innovation Prizes in Government

奖品和重大挑战——奖励第一个完成某项壮举或发明新技术的人或团队的竞赛——可以发挥重要作用，通过创新，帮助国家应对和解决复杂问题，实现增强竞争力、促进国民健康和保障国防等重要目标。鉴于对这些竞赛日益增长的兴趣及其显著效果，有必要系统地汇编有关如何设计、管理和评估这些资助机制的科学知识。本项目分析现有的经验证据，综合有关奖金的研究成果，撰写研究报告，并提供可操作的建议，帮助政府机构更有效地利用奖金，实现其使命。奖项代表了创新和创造力的非常规实例，代表了激励创新、教育和培训学生的方式，以及提高对更广泛政策问题的认识。这个项目有助于更好地理解政府奖励的价值和潜力，但它的建议也适用于解决其他紧迫的社会或经济问题，这些问题不一定与技术有关。本项目对过去15年的科学证据和其他非学术文献进行评估，然后对现有知识进行回顾和综合，以澄清关于奖金在科技政策中的用途，我们知道什么，我们不知道什么。它试图回答诸如某些设计参数如何影响其结果、每一美元奖金所引起的实际激励效应以及奖金对赞助商使命的贡献类型等问题。它的综合利用了研究成果，重点关注四个主题：设计、实施、结果的使用和奖项的评估。它分析和比较所审查的出版物的方法学质量，并调查研究差异的原因。

Prizes and grand challenges - competitions that offer a reward to the first person or team that achieves a certain feat or invents a new technology - can play an important role and, through innovation, help the nation tackle and solve complex problems to achieve important goals such as becoming more competitive, advancing the national health, and securing the national defense. Given the growing interest in these competitions and their notable effect, there is a need to systematically compile scientific knowledge on how to design, manage, and evaluate these funding mechanisms. This project analyzes existing empirical evidence, produces a research report with a synthesis of research findings on prizes, and provides actionable recommendations to help government agencies make a more efficient use of prizes and achieve their missions. Prizes represent unconventional instances of innovation and creativity and represent a way to incentivize innovation, educate and train students in S&T, and increase awareness of broader policy issues. This project helps better understand the value and potential of government prizes but its recommendations also have application to solve other pressing societal or economic problems that are not necessarily technology-related.This project evaluates scientific evidence and other non-academic literature of the past 15 years, and then reviews and synthesizes existing knowledge to clarify what is and what is not known about prizes with regards to their use in science and technology policy. It seeks to answer questions such as how certain design parameters affect their outcome, the actual incentive effect induced per award dollar, and the kind of contributions prizes make to the sponsor's mission. Its synthesis taps into research's findings and focuses on four main themes: design, implementation, use of results and evaluation of prizes. It analyzes and compares the methodological quality of the reviewed publications and investigates the reasons for differences across studies.