McKinsey & Company’s recent report on prize philanthropy is a useful overview of the field. Titled “And the winner is . . .capturing the promise of philanthropic prizes”, the report is available here. Kudos to McKinsey for conducting a broad scan of an important philanthropic tool, and to the John Templeton Foundation for initiating the idea, sponsoring the work and sharing it with the field.

Why is this report useful? It puts prizes in historical perspective and explores the reasons for the recent increase in their use. It combines a review of the scholarly literature with insights gleaned from the leading practitioners in the field. And it develops a set of categories that go beyond the useful, but limited, distinction between recognition prizes and inducement (or incentive) prizes. The report’s six prize archetypes point to important traits that anyone considering using prizes should carefully review.

I was particularly interested in this report because RWJF, and the Pioneer Portfolio in particular, has worked with many of the organizations featured in the report. We have worked with Changemakers on a number of competitions, and are continuing to do so. We worked with Hope Lab on the Ruckus Nation competition and with Idea Crossing on its Innovation Challenge for MBA students around the world. And we worked with the X Prize Foundation in its efforts to develop a health prize. These experiences influenced my thinking as I read the report, and prompt two suggestions for future work on prize philanthropy.

The first is to work towards a clearer sense of the boundaries of this field. Prize philanthropy, when viewed broadly (as this report did), covers a huge territory. This makes it difficult to distinguish from a whole host of other strategic (goal-oriented) philanthropic approaches. For example, the report lists four important lessons about how to create and deliver effective prizes (p. 35), but none of these lessons is unique to prize philanthropy; they apply to any type of strategic philanthropic activity.

Another boundary issue is the blurring of philanthropic prizes and business prizes (that is, prizes that have commercial purposes or applications). Prize competitions that require significant capital investment by competitors are usually a poor match for prizes that aim to improve the public good, as most philanthropic activities do.

A last boundary issue involves the definition of “prize.” How does a prize differ, for example, from the Foundation’s programs (most of the Foundation’s work) that make awards based on open competitions judged by panels outside the Foundation? Structurally, such Foundation programs share some characteristics with the X Prize Foundation and Changemakers, and can result in the well-known “brochure effect” – the benefit of a number of organizations undertaking work on a problem as a result of applying to a program, even though they were not selected.

These boundaries and definitions matter, as it is in experience with the specifics of alternative designs that real learning accrues to the field in improving future philanthropic practice.  And this leads to my second point . . .

We need much more information than this report provides about risks, difficulties, and failures. The examples of difficulties the report does note – NASA, John Templeton Foundation, and FIRST Robotics - are quite instructive. In our own experience, we learned a great deal through working with the X Prize Foundation in trying to develop a health prize. We came to appreciate the need to have concrete and easily measureable goals. That need suggests that prizes may not work well for targets that involve getting a large number of people making significant behavioral change, as the measurement and validation structure could get quite costly.

Of course, it is easy to suggest what else could be done. But I don’t want to take my eye off the prize, which in this case is that this report does a good job at giving us a current overview of prize philanthropy.

Major thanks to Steven Levitt of the New York Times Freakonomics blog (and co-author of the book by the same name) for publishing a post on the new Changemakers competition, "Designing for Better Health."  The competition, which seeks innovative "nudges" that can influence people to make healthier choices for themselves or others, has kicked off a really interesting string of comments among Freakonomics blog readers.  Add your perspectives, either there or on the Changemakers competition site.

People can be so…so…so stubborn. They know the right thing to do—eat servings of fruits and vegetables every day—they just don’t do it. Or they don’t get around to doing it. Or they do it for a little while—exercise for 30 minutes every day—and then they stop doing it. Or their environment creates barriers to doing it.

One way to think about it is that, often, life gets in the way doing the right thing. The kids, the job, the economy (“What the hell? Where did my 401k go??) all compete for time and attention. And sometimes, it’s not life, but the choice itself that gets in the way. Any of you who spent time trying to help an older parent figure out what choice to make under Medicare Part D knows what I mean when I say some choices are just too complicated. When faced with making a complicated choice in real life, many of us end up making choices that aren’t the best ones we could make.

We’ve launched a global competition looking for “nudges,” innovative little pushes – that help people make better decisions regarding their own health and the health of others. The competition is co-sponsored by Ashoka’s Changemakers project and is based on the ideas put forth by Richard Thayler and Cass Sunstein in their book Nudge. Here’s an example of a nudge focusing on wearing motorcycle helmets: instead of making helmet-wearing mandatory, you permit people to ride without a helmet…but only if they qualify for a special helmet-less motorcycle license. To qualify, they’d need to pass a class that improves their riding skills and they’d have to carry an extra amount of insurance. The goal is not to remove someone’s ability to make choices, but, rather to “nudge” them in the direction of the better choice.

If you think you have a good nudge, you can enter the competition here. 

Somebody sent me this image of a handprint featured in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.  So stunning.

Why?  The handprint was taken from an ungloved health care worker after performing an abdominal exam on a patient -- the pink area on the left represents MRSA colonies grown from the handprint.  Image B shows a second hand imprint obtained from the worker, after those same hands were treated with alcohol foam.  The resulting culture tested negative for MRSA.  So simple.

And still such a struggle for well-meaning care providers to take the necessary preventive steps.  Arghhh.  Innovations emerging from the Plexus Institute's positive deviance initiatives offer one promising path to a solution.  Last month, they were highlighted in the New York Times "Year in Ideas" for their success in changing processes that enable the right behaviors in hospitals' assault on MRSA infections.

Where might new innovations emerge to break through seemingly intractable problems like this?  Perhaps from the new idea competition  we launched yesterday with Ashoka's Changemakers to find those who are designing effective "nudges" that help people make better health decisions.  Paul Tarini will be writing more about the vision behind this competition, but if you're curious, check it out and join the search for simple but elegant breakthroughs that might prevent the next case of someone checking in to the hospital and winding up with a MRSA autograph stamped on his or her body.

I mentioned in my post on FasterCures' Mid-Year Top 10 Watch List that they were working on an Innocentive competition to discover breakthroughs in disease research. Yesterday, that competition went live -- FasterCures will award a guaranteed payout of $10,000 for the two most promising ideas that encourage companies to invest and collaborate more in biomarker research and qualification.

Biomarkers are used by medical professionals to determine proper diagnosis, prognosis and the optimal course of treatment for a patient. Widely viewed as a critical technology to personalizing treatment choices and maximizing the impact of medical treatments, biomarkers are key to the biomedical research process and can shave years and millions of dollars from the research and development process.

According to FasterCures President Greg Simon, health care industries have "...little incentive to invest in biomarker research and development and keep the results of their investment in the public domain, where it can do the most good."  Hence the move to crowd-source solutions from the open scientific community that competes in Innocentive's online challenges. Their hope is to eliminate that "first-mover disadvantage" by throwing the search for solutions wide open -- Innocentive's network reaches 160,000 "Solvers" based in 175 countries and cutting across 60+ industry disciplines.

The biomarker challenge is posted in InnoCentive’s Global Health Pavilion, home to competitions that focus on solving some of the world’s biggest health challenges. The entry deadline is November 15, 2008. We'll be interested to see how this approach to discovering breakthrough ideas works for FasterCures.