Big memo from OMB on Innovative Prizes and Engagement

To me the most important sentence is this: “Establish an important goal without having to choose the approach or the team that is most likely to succeed”. From what I’ve seen, most of the time when the government awards an IT contract, it ends up putting a bunch of eggs in one basket (the winning bid) and that makes innovation actually irrational.

Contests are, of course, the other extreme, where there is free competition of not only companies but ideas and architectures and products. And the government puts no eggs in any basket really.

But obviously that can only scale so far. No one is going to write a patent application management system as part of a contest. (unless it were a really, really big prize. :)) But hopefully this gets people thinking about the fact that procurement now is all about competition between companies, but it doesn’t do enough to encourage the full competition of ideas.