Innovation Prize Research Articles

Sir John Cornforth (‘Kappa’): Some Personal Recollections

Sir Harold Kroto is the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University carrying out research in cluster chemistry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1996, he was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for discovering the fullerenes which resulted in a new and unique field of chemistry. His awards include the Copley Medal as well as the Blackett and Faraday Lectureships of the Royal Society, the Tilden Lectureship and Longstaff Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Italgas Prize for Innovation and the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy ‘Science pour l’Art’ prize. He has some 40 honorary degrees. His Global Educational Outreach for SET (GEOSET streaming from www.geoset.info) project evolved from his earlier TV/Internet Vega Science Trust initiative which has some 300 lectures, interviews, discussions, workshops, and career programmes archived and streaming from www.vega.org.uk

Abstracts of the London Trauma Conference 2013, December 10-13, 2013, London, United Kingdom.

The seventh London Trauma Conference was once again held at The Royal Geographical Society in London from 10–13 December 2013. Over four days the latest innovations and best practice in cardiac, trauma and pre-hospital trauma care were presented and discussed. It opened with the London Cardiac Arrest Symposium, kindly sponsored by Zoll, with Dr David Zideman providing the Douglas Chamberlain Lecture; an insightful presentation into the world of Sports Medicine. Over the subsequent three days, delegates heard from internationally acclaimed speakers who addressed key questions relating to trauma, major incident management, and pre-hospital care. Keynote speakers included Professor Dan Davis, Prof Bryan McNally, Mr Michael Crumplin, Mr Justin Lewis and Professor John Pickard. The Norwegian Air ambulance hosted the Air ambulance and pre-hospital care day that reflected on the latest developments, debated best practice and speculated on the future of clinical work in this setting. On the final day, the Peter Baskett Lecture was given by Mr Michael Crumplin, who provided a fascinating over view of the developments in combat trauma care over the last six centuries. Additional, breakaway sessions took place on each day of the conference. These included Resuscitative Thoracotomy, Practical Cardiac arrest and Neurotrauma masterclasses; Core topics in trauma, a Trauma Research Forum, and the annually anticipated evening of Stand up Science. Prizes at the conference were awarded as follows; The most inspiring clinical presentation was awarded to Dr Steen Barnung for his moving and impressive account of a multiple paediatric drowning incident that took place in Denmark. Best posters: Dr Kate Crewdson and Dr Beth Healey Stand up Science was won jointly by: Dr’s Maria Guerreiro and Hew Torrance. The innovation prize was won by: Professor Hans Morten Lossius for his work on Pre-hospital stroke thrombolysis. This year’s conference reminded delegates of the potential applications of new technology and innovation in prehospital, trauma and cardiac care but also the importance of ensuring that well established simple interventions are performed reliably and consistently. Once again the conference attracted speakers and delegates from 18 countries and continues to be a forum for learning network and debate. The eighth London conference will take place at the same venue between 9–12 December 2014. This supplement provides a selection of seven extended abstracts written by speakers at the conference illustrating some of the diverse subject matter covered and also the scientific abstracts from oral and poster presentations made at the conference.

CNRS Silver and Bronze Medals 2014 / Albrecht Kossel Prize: R. Lill / Innovation Prize in Medicinal/Pharmaceutical Chemistry: P. R. Wich / Elected to the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities: F. M. Bickelhaupt

CNRS Silver and Bronze Medals 2014 / Albrecht Kossel Prize: R. Lill / Innovation Prize in Medicinal/Pharmaceutical Chemistry: P. R. Wich / Elected to the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities: F. M. Bickelhaupt

Mindwise: how we understand what others think, believe, feel, and want

From leading psychologist Nicholas Epley, Mindwise reveals our real sixth sense - our ability to understand our own minds and the minds of others Arguably our brain's greatest sense is the ability to understand the minds of others - our sixth sense. In Mindwise, renowned psychologist Nicholas Epley shows that this incredible capacity for inferring what others are thinking and feeling is, however sophisticated, still prone to critical errors. We often misread social situations, misjudge others' characters, or guess the wrong motives for their actions. Drawing on the latest in psychological research, Epley suggests that only by learning more about our sixth sense will we have the humility to overcome these errors and understand others as they actually are instead of as we imagine them to be. Lucid and magnetic ...a guide to understanding the minds of others. (Independent). A comfortingly slim volume about the ability we all have to understand others ...how wonderful to have this insight into the extent of our ignorance. (Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times). Nicholas Epley is the John T. Keller of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has written for The New York Times, and has published over 50 articles in two dozen journals in his field. He was named a Professor to Watch by the Financial Times, is the winner of the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was awarded the 2011 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. He lives in Chicago.

A Longitude Prize for the twenty-first century

The UK Government’s new prize for substantial innovation to address pressing societal problems should be welcomed, says Martin Rees.

A healthy tension in translational research

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Harrington Discovery Institute for the honor of being named the inaugural recipient of the Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine. I accept this distinction with a deep sense of gratitude and debt to my mentors, trainees, colleagues, collaborators, patients, and family. Moments of recognition such as this are rare, savored, and sustaining. They also invariably provoke personal reflection about what exactly is being recognized. If something innovative truly stands apart in my work, I have come to the conclusion that it relates less to the methods utilized to address questions and more to the questions I choose to ask, and when I ask them.

Bernard Lerer: Recipient of the 2014 Inaugural Werner Kalow Responsible Innovation Prize in Global Omics and Personalized Medicine (Pacific Rim Association for Clinical Pharmacogenetics)

This article announces the recipient of the 2014 inaugural Werner Kalow Responsible Innovation Prize in Global Omics and Personalized Medicine by the Pacific Rim Association for Clinical Pharmacogenetics (PRACP): Bernard Lerer, professor of psychiatry and director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel. The Werner Kalow Responsible Innovation Prize is given to an exceptional interdisciplinary scholar who has made highly innovative and enduring contributions to global omics science and personalized medicine, with both vertical and horizontal (transdisciplinary) impacts. The prize is established in memory of a beloved colleague, mentor, and friend, the late Professor Werner Kalow, who cultivated the idea and practice of pharmacogenetics in modern therapeutics commencing in the 1950s. PRACP, the prize's sponsor, is one of the longest standing learned societies in the Asia-Pacific region, and was founded by Kalow and colleagues more than two decades ago in the then-emerging field of pharmacogenetics. In announcing this inaugural prize and its winner, we seek to highlight the works of prize winner, Professor Lerer. Additionally, we contextualize the significance of the prize by recalling the life and works of Professor Kalow and providing a brief socio-technical history of the rise of pharmacogenetics and personalized medicine as a veritable form of 21(st) century scientific practice. The article also fills a void in previous social science analyses of pharmacogenetics, by bringing to the fore the works of Kalow from 1995 to 2008, when he presciently noted the rise of yet another field of postgenomics inquiry--pharmacoepigenetics--that railed against genetic determinism and underscored the temporal and spatial plasticity of genetic components of drug response, with invention of the repeated drug administration (RDA) method that estimates the dynamic heritabilities of drug response. The prize goes a long way to cultivate transgenerational capacity and broader cognizance of the concept and practice of responsible innovation as an important criterion of 21(st) century omics science and personalized medicine. A new call is presently in place for the 2016 PRACP Werner Kalow prize. Nominations can be made in support of an exceptional individual interdisciplinary scholar, or alternatively, an entire research team, from any region in the world with a record of highly innovative contributions to global omics science and/or personalized medicine, in the spirit of responsible innovation. The application process is straightforward, requiring a signed, 1500-word nomination letter (by the applicant or sponsor) submitted not later than May 31, 2015.

High Honors For Methanol Research

Some 30 years of alternative fuels and feedstocks research based on methanol has garnered Nobel Laureate George A. Olah and his colleague G. K. Surya Prakash a new $1 million award presented last week by the State of Israel. Prakash accepted the inaugural Eric & Sheila Samson Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels for Transportation on behalf of himself and Olah during the Bloomberg Fuel Choices Summit, held on Nov. 12–13 in Tel Aviv. The prize is part of an Israeli initiative, supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to reduce that country’s dependence on foreign oil. This year’s award recognizes Olah and Prakash’s work on the methanol economy, which proposes to use methanol to replace fossil fuels and petroleum-based feedstocks. Olah and Prakash are both professors of chemistry at the University of Southern California. Olah is a professor of organic chemistry, and Prakash is a professor of hydrocarbon ...

War on the Ru-net

When the controversial Russian art collective Voina (War) painted a rudimentary outline phallus on the Liteinyi Bridge in Saint Petersburg one summer night in 2010, few could have predicted that ten months later they would be named laureates of the prestigious Innovation Prize. This article examines the historical context of protest art in Russia as well as the contemporary online response to Dick Captured by the FSB on a number of popular comments forums to argue that the work has become an open-ended, democratic performance; an internet icon that emerges from and relies on the mass, active participation of its online audience.

Market Outcomes and Dynamic Patent Buyouts

Patents are a useful but imperfect reward for innovation. In sectors like pharmaceuticals, where monopoly distortions seem particularly severe, there is growing international political pressure to identify alternatives to patents that could lower prices. Innovation prizes and other non-patent rewards are becoming more prevalent in government's innovation policy, and are also widely implemented by private philanthropists. In this paper we describe situations in which a patent buyout is effective, using information from market outcomes as a guide to the payment amount. We allow for the fact that sales may be manipulable by the innovator in search of the buyout payment, and show that in a wide variety of cases the optimal policy still involves some form of patent buyout. The buyout uses two key pieces of information: market outcomes observed during the patent's life, and the competitive outcome after the patent is bought out. We show that such dynamic market information can be effective at determining both marginal and total willingness to pay of consumers in many important cases, and therefore can generate the right innovation incentives.

Prize for innovation in distributed computing

column Share on Prize for innovation in distributed computing: awarded to Roger Wattenhofer Author: David Peleg View Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGACT NewsVolume 44Issue 2June 2013 pp 89–91https://doi.org/10.1145/2491533.2491552Published:03 June 2013Publication History 0citation96DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads96Last 12 Months1Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

A review of SIROCCO 2012

Who would have thought that Sirocco winds could one day blow over Iceland? The distributed computing community made it happen by holding the 19th International Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity (sirocco) in Reykjavik1. With its 120,000 inhabitants, its harbor, small town houses, but crowded bars and many cultural venues, Reykjavik has an air of a village and one of a European metropolis at the same time. In July, the days last forever and so does the hustle and bustle in Reykjavik streets. Reykjavik University, where the conference took place, is located in the southern part of the city, in a newly built campus on the shore, just next to a naturally heated sand beach, and is equipped with modern and pleasant facilities. The fifty or so participants had there the perfect environment to discuss advances in sirocco’s areas of interest. sirocco is devoted to the study of communication and knowledge in distributed systems from both qualitative and quantitative viewpoints. It has been indeed the aim of sirocco, since its 1994 first edition, to comprehend trade-offs and interplay between information that entities are provided in a distributed system and their computational and communication power. Aside from rather traditional problems such as agreement, local decision or graph exploration, new and innovative ones were also given special attention such as problems involving game theoretic aspects and quantum computations. And it is in reflection of this innovative spirit that each year, a Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing is awarded to individuals whose contribution introduced new approaches or research areas. This year, 28 talks were selected among 54 submitted papers, with Roger Wattenhofer and Boaz Patt-Shamir as invited speakers.

Innovation Prize Award 2013

Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical SeriesVolume 50, Issue 4 p. 19965C-19965C Industries Innovation Prize Award 2013 First published: 04 June 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6346.2013.05157.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume50, Issue4June 2013Pages 19965C-19965C RelatedInformation

An innovation prize for clean cookstoves

An innovation prize for clean cookstoves

2012 World Leisure International Innovation Prize Winners

The World Leisure International Innovation Prize is awarded to projects which demonstrate originality, creativity and innovation. The Prize Committee seeks best practice projects that are inspirati...

Beyond the Patents-Prizes Debate

Intellectual property scholars have vigorously debated the merits of patents versus prizes for encouraging innovation, with occasional consideration of government grants. But these are not the only options. Perhaps most significantly, the patents-versus-prizes (or patents-versus-prizes-versus-grants) debate has largely neglected the role of tax incentives in innovation policy, despite the tens of billions of dollars spent globally on tax breaks for RD like grants, they reduce the social-welfare costs of frictions in imperfect capital markets. Our taxonomy also sheds new light on nonefficiency dimensions of R&D policy. Grants, tax credits, and prizes generally require all taxpayers to subsidize R&D regardless of whether they use the resulting products, whereas the patent system imposes R&D costs primarily upon the consumers who purchase patented products. In some contexts (e.g., life-saving drugs), the user-pays aspect of the patent system is difficult to defend on distributive justice grounds. In other contexts (e.g., luxury goods), the user-pays aspect of the patent system may make patents normatively preferable in comparison to alternative incentive mechanisms.Ultimately, optimal innovation policy will depend on a range of factors that are likely to vary across contexts. For example, grants may be optimal where the government has a comparative advantage in evaluating potential projects, while tax credits may be optimal where potential innovators have private information about project prospects and limited access to outside capital. We argue for a pluralistic approach to innovation policy that incorporates each of the four main incentive mechanisms, and we provide examples of this pluralistic approach in practice.

Incentives for Innovation: Patents, Prizes, and Research Contracts

AbstractInnovation is essential for sustaining growth and economic development in a world that faces population increase, natural resource depletion, and environmental challenges. Incentives play a critical role in innovation because the required research and development activities are costly, and the resulting knowledge has the attributes of a public good. This paper discusses the economics of institutions and policies meant to provide incentives for research and innovation, and focuses on intellectual property rights, specifically patents, contracted research (for example grants), and innovation prizes. The main economic implications of these institutions are discussed, with particular attention paid to open questions and recent contributions.

Patents for Humanity

This article evaluates two policy initiatives by the United States Government to address access to essential medicines -- Priority Review vouchers and “Patents for Humanity. Such proposals are aimed at speeding up the regulatory review of inventions with humanitarian uses and applications by the United States Food and Drug Administration, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It is argued that such measures fall short of international standards and norms established by the World Intellectual Property Organization Development Agenda 2007; the World Trade Organization’s Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health 2001 and the WTO General Council Decision of August 30, 2003; and the World Health Organization’s declarations on intellectual property and public health. This article concludes that there is a need for broader patent law reform in the United States to address matters of patent law and public health. Moreover, there is a need to experiment with other, more promising alternative models of research and development -- such as medical innovation prizes, a Health Impact Fund, the Medicines Patent Pool, and Open Source Drug Discovery.

Grand Innovation Prizes: A theoretical, normative, and empirical evaluation

This paper provides a systematic examination of the use of a Grand Innovation Prize (GIP) in action – the Progressive Automotive Insurance X PRIZE – a $10 million prize for a highly efficient vehicle. Following a mechanism design approach we define three key dimensions for GIP evaluation: objectives, design, and performance, where prize design includes ex ante specifications, ex ante incentives, qualification rules, and award governance. Within this framework we compare observations of GIPs from three domains – empirical reality, theory, and policy – to better understand their function as an incentive mechanism for encouraging new solutions to large-scale social challenges. Combining data from direct observation, personal interviews, and surveys, together with analysis of extant theory and policy documents on GIPs, our results highlight three points of divergence: first, over the complexity of defining prize specifications; secondly, over the nature and role of incentives, particularly patents; thirdly, the overlooked challenges associated with prize governance. Our approach identifies a clear roadmap for future theory and policy around GIPs.

Opportunities and Challenges in the Use of Innovation Prizes as a Government Policy Instrument

Inducement prizes have been long used to stimulate individuals and groups to accomplish diverse goals. Lately, governments have become more and more interested in these prizes and sought to include this kind of incentives within the set of policy tools available to promote science, technology, and innovation. To date, however, there has been little empirically-based scientific knowledge on how to design, manage, and evaluate innovation prizes. This note discusses aspects of the prize phenomenon and the opportunities and challenges related with the use of innovation prizes as a government policy instrument. Compared to other incentive mechanisms, prizes are likely to present advantages to, for example, accelerate the development and commercialization of technologies that are held back for diverse reasons and help to leverage public money with external ideas, collaborative efforts, and the participation of diverse individuals and organizations. Still, despite these advantages and other interesting features of prizes, there are key questions that policy-makers and scholars must address to better understand this kind of incentives and further improve prize designs and implementations before governments move forward to a more widespread use of innovation prizes in science and technology policies.