"These contests and prizes become a quality-control mechanism," says Yogen Dalal, a managing director of the Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California.
To be sure, the devil is in the details. The creation of a great contest echoes the lesson of the Goldilocks story: Make the goal not too difficult, but not too easy.
As more innovation contests are introduced, the more obvious goals may already be met. For instance, there is already an all-electric car made by Tesla Motors of San Carlos, California - going into production Monday - that promises to achieve more than 42.51km per liter. But the Tesla car is only a two-seater.
The complexities of creating the auto prize illustrate a wider problem of how to come up with ever more novel tests of human ingenuity over time. Brand of the Long Now Foundation predicts that contests will soon pursue "things we truly think of as impossible."
Brand's wish list includes machines that defy gravity or that allow us to read the minds of other people.
Hey, Tyra Banks, are you available for an afternoon of Vulcan mind-melding?
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