This paper explores whether innovation breakthroughs stimulate or impede future progress in individual innovation. On the one hand, one could argue that substantial improvements to the status quo might inspire advances through competition.…Read More
The 2018-2019 Vehicle Innovations Challenge will track developments in technology, automaker strategies, the competitive landscape and the regulatory environment to inform forecasters about these new issues while involving them in a global crowd-sourced effort to anticipate the trajectory of an industry in upheaval.…Read More
Grand Innovation Prizes are contests where a prize is given for the first team to achieve a radical technical goal–such as reaching space with a commercial passenger rocket. The phenomenon of GIPs have become an important topic for study in recent years.…Read More
In many innovation settings, ideas are generated over time and managers face a decision about if and how to provide in-process feedback to the idea generators about the quality of submissions. In this article, we use design contests allowing repeated entry to examine the effect of in-process feedback on idea generation.…Read More
This event is the culmination of the 4th iteration of the Y-Prize competition in which student teams propose innovative commercial applications for technology invented by Penn researchers. The focal technology this year was biomedical engineering developed by professors David Issadore, Jim Gee, Paul Yushkevich, Brian Avants, Brian Litt and Zack
Contests have a long history of driving innovation, and web-based information technology has opened up new possibilities for managing tournaments. One such possibility is the visibility of entries – some web-based platforms now allow participants to observe others’ submissions while the contest is live.…Read More
One key piece of the Mack Institute’s mission is to enable innovation across the Penn community. To that end, on November 7th the institute hosted the first of its Innovation Clinics, a workshop series aimed at the intersection of medicine, engineering, and business.…Read More
While much of the country was staying up late on the first Tuesday in November to watch election results roll in, for Mack Institute staffers the night after was the real nail-biter. This was the deadline for entries in the Y-Prize, and our anticipation was well rewarded.…Read More
In crowdsourcing contests, choices about contest structure affect both number and quality of entries. Funded Researcher Pinar Yildrim shares knowledge about how firms can get their ideal results by manipulating contest structure.…Read More
Innovation tournaments are an increasingly popular tool for organizations looking for fresh ideas: they open the gates to ideas from all employees, especially those on the front lines, and let people vote on their colleagues’ ideas to narrow the pool. This leads to consideration of increasingly smaller groups of ideas…Read More
Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment designed to evaluate the impact of rank incentives and tournaments on the productivity and composition of teams.…Read More
