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

当你遇到困难的时候，会怎么办？找专家？问朋友？或者你会找陌生人来帮你解决问题，你付钱给他们作为回报？这正是“挑战奖”背后的初衷。近来，“挑战奖”这个概念再次受到人们的欢迎。跟随本集《随身英语》，了解“挑战奖”的由来和人们利用它的原由。

课文内容 Vocabulary: Innovation and problem-solving 词汇: 创新和解决问题

What do you do when you have a problem? Do you go to an expert, ask your friends to come up with an idea? Or, given the chance, would you ask a crowd of strangers for a solution? It may sound strange, but it has spurred more than a few successful innovations. That’s the thinking behind a 'challenge prize'.

Challenge prizes come in many shapes and sizes but the basic concept remains the same. Rather than consulting and paying an expert to innovate a solution, you offer the prize up to anyone who believes they can solve it and present the first to do so with a prize. This might sound odd - many would argue, 'Who is better qualified than an expert?' But actually, not using one seems to result in a great deal of thinking outside of the box.

Some argue that formal education can kill creativity because it sometimes only teaches a single solution to a problem or single method to achieve a task. In the same way, some suggest that experts can suffer from tunnel vision. "If we launch an XPRIZE and it's just the 'experts' that come out and compete, they're usually the ones that will tell us it can't be done." says Marcus Shingles, former CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, which organises challenge prizes today.

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