Government's new modus operandi for innovation: The Prize

By The Post's Joel Achenbach:

The U.S. government is giving away prizes. In seeking solutions to problems, it has discovered the magic of contests, or challenges -- also known as open grantmaking or open innovation. Or crowdsourcing.

Whatever you call this new way of doing business, it represents a dramatic departure from the norm for the bureaucratic, command-and-control federal government. To be sure, the agencies won't abandon the traditional method of doling out grants to predictable bidders. But in the new era of innovation-by-contest, the government will sometimes identify a specific problem or goal, announce a competition, set some rules and let the game begin.

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