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Succeeding At Innovation Requires More Failures

Says Tim Harford, author of "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failures." from an interview in today's NY Times Economix blog.

Here's Harford on how the U. S. can promote more innovation:
"...this is fundamentally an organizational problem: how to harness the diversity of the private sector with the long-term funding of the public sector?

"I see two promising approaches. One is to earmark more government research grants for high-risk projects. A fascinating research paper compares conservative medical research grants from the National Institutes of Health with more speculative grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Hughes approach produces more failures but many more “big hits.” Clearly, there’s a balance to be struck.

"A second approach is the use of innovation prizes. These have received increasing attention but there’s potential to put up far larger prizes — multibillion-dollar affairs."

Count me in for that multi-billion dollar thing!

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