The problem-solving prizes 为鼓励创新和解决问题设置“挑战奖”_BBC

The problem-solving prizes 为鼓励创新和解决问题设置“挑战奖”

There are other advantages too. "You're not asking people to use a particular solution set on how to solve that problem. So you get this tremendous amount of diversity." adds Shingles. And because the crowd acts like an impromptu think tank, its lateral thinking can throw up issues that may have been overlooked.

Challenge prizes were most popular during the 18th and 19th centuries, but have received renewed interest more recently. Historically, many practical inventions have been conceived in this way – for example, the tin can. More recently, Virgin Galactic, a company hoping to commercialise space flight, developed out of the Ansari XPRIZE 2004 winner Tier One. They successfully launched a reusable spacecraft that left the Earth's atmosphere twice in two weeks. The prize was $10m.

However, there are dangers connected to blue-sky thinking. "You don't want to be creating a challenge prize which incentivises people to solve a problem where there is no demand," says Tris Dyson, executive director of challenge prizes at Nesta, a UK-based innovation foundation. This happened in 1979 where a Kremer prize of £100,000 was claimed by the first person to fly under human power across the English Channel. Despite its successful completion, it has not led to the adoption of human-powered flight as a form of travel. And of course, there are those who invest their personal time and money only to see no return at all: someone else claims the prize, or they find that the reward does not match the resources they invested.