Prizes for innovation, or Asking people about stuff they know

Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture Secretary, says the Conservative Government would offer a prize of £1,000,000 to someone:

[T]hat develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies…

Explaining his proposal on the Today programme yesterday, he said:

What this idea is, is can we find a find a way of structuring these ideas so that you give more weight to people who have more expertise or who are recognised as having a better track record in terms of previous ideas they’ve had. I think if we can do that we can actually harness the ideas that people have.

The response from his political opponents has been predictable, but disappointingly superficial.

For the LibDems, Jenny Willott:

This prize is clearly a publicity stunt and a total waste of taxpayers’ money. There are already a multitude of ways to communicate with large numbers of people online, from Facebook to discussion groups.

Maybe the Tories are so out of touch they don’t know what’s out there, but they shouldn’t waste £1m of public money reinventing the wheel.

Ouch. It really sounds as if the Tories have put their foot in it. May be Labour were more positive? Apparently Labour MPs were queuing up to comment.

Tessa Jowell, Olympics Minister:

Families want serious, thought-through policies that meet their aspirations, not short-term public relations stunts. Labour already makes full use of collaboration and social networking technologies to consult with people.

Kerry McCarthy, government lead for online campaigning (aka “The Twitter Czar”):

The idea that a Conservative government would spend £1million of our money on giving people a say in picking the England football team when it’s already being talked about in every pub across the country is absolutely barmy.

Ben Bradshaw, Mr. Hunt’s opposite number:

The Tories’ lack of policies is becoming more and more transparent. Instead of developing serious policies they are now just dreaming up gimmicks.

With that kind of negative response, either Jeremy Hunt’s dropped a phenomenal clanger, or this is really rather a good idea. Which is it?

To be clear, two things are proposed. The criticism has failed to focus on one or other, probably in part to avoid the more complicated message which would result from measured criticism of one or other aspect. It’s important to seperate them out so as to properly evaluate what’s being suggested.

• First, method: having a prize competition to procure an IT system, rather than using traditional procurement methods. There has been some direct criticism of this – Tessa Jowell and Jenny Willott’s comments certainly are, and Sunny Hundal on Liberal Conspiracy appears to echo this (although his main point is about the partisan-ship of the Taxpayers Alliance, and not Hunt’s proposal).

• Second,  objective: an IT system, the online platform which the competition winner would need to provide. This seems to be attacked by almost everyone, generally dismissed as a gimmick.

Taking the method first, what about prize competitions? From the opponents, there appears to be a lack of appreciation for the history of such exercises. When asked whether she would have opposed the Longitude Prize, Kerry McCarthy responded:

I have absolutely no idea what that was, but I suspect it’s an analogy that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. [The] Tory idea is silly gimmick.

[The Longitude Prize was instituted by by an Act of Parliament in 1714, in order to encourage the development of a method for determining the longitude of a ship at sea. The prize itself was £20,000, concidentally equivalent to about £1,500,000 today, and as with Jeremy Hunt's proposal it was seen as an alternative to funding the development directly. Some limited R&D funding was available under the Act, but only for further developing existing and proven work which showed promise of achieving the goal.]

In terms of scrutinising the analogy, it is difficult to see why it doesn’t stand up. In both cases, a prize is offered to encourage research and development towards a specific goal, rather than the state providing up front funding. In both cases, the offering of a prize allows participation by anyone who could make a real contribution (in contrast to the barriers to entry posed by traditional procurement exercises) and outsources the funding of the R&D work.

Sunny Hundal offers a more developed criticism of the analogy:

It’s usually private money or philanthropy. This is taxpayers money.

My initial reaction to this is that he’s simply wrong, but in point of fact he’s correct, provided you limit your historical review to the earlier part of the 20th Century. During that period there was certainly a predominance of private innovation prizes over public ones, but this was a relatively new development historically.

Important earlier examples (the 1714 Longitude Prize aside) include the Alkali Prize offered by Louis XVI in 1775 (promoting commercial processes for the production of alkalis), and the the Food Preservation and Turbine Prizes offered by the Society for the Encouragement of Industry in 1794 and 1823 respectively (prompting the development of food canning and water turbine generators).

The 19th Century the growth of industry and philanthropy saw a development of private innovation prizes, culminating in the Chicago Times-Herald Prize, offered for a 54 mile race conducted in 1895. The entrants were self-propolled carriages; the prize prompted the development of some of the earliest true cars.

As to the 20th Century, it is generally forgotten that the history of aviation is a history of innovation prizes. Betwen the turn of the century and the early 1930s, a sequence of prizes offered for duration, Channel crossings, and ultimately trans-Atlantic flight led to many of the pivotal “firsts”. Both Alcock & Brown and Charles Lindbergh made their trans-Atlantic crossings in prize competitions. The modern day X Prizes for space flight are in a grand tradition.

Whilst government was no longer the only source of innovation prizes, they continued to provide them. The 1958 act which established NASA provided for payments and prizes for technological and scientific innovations which furthered NASA’s objectives (many have since been awarded), and in the 1980s and 1990s the US FCC used valuable non-cash prizes (such as spectrum grants) to encourage the development of new technology.

The past decade has seen a growth in government innovation prizes, prompted in part by the success of the Ansari X Prize in driving the development of commercial space tourism. The US has built on its long standing traditions in this area with projects such as DARPA’s Grand Challenge (for driverless vehicles) and Network Challenge (for network based problem solving), and NASA’s COTS programme, which like the 1714 Longitude prize offers both a lucrative incentive and some limited R&D funding available based on interim results.

The Labour Government in the UK has also been keen to use prize competitions, with the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts offering a £1,000,000 prize for community-led responses to climate change, and the MoD running its own “Grand Challenge” competition, focused on the development of battlefield technologies.

If the use of prize competitions to encourage innovation has a long and successful history (and indeed is a method adopted by the currenty government), it is difficult to give any credance to any criticism leveled at Hunt for his method. As noted above, this may well be why none of the politicians have bothered to properly discriminate between the objective Hunt sets out, and the method he proposes.

After all, traditional Government funded IT projects do not have a happy history. A combination of poor management by ministers and civil servants alike, and what often appears from the outside to be a frightening lack of technical knowledge and compentence, leads to massive cost overruns, poorly designed systems, and a failure to deliver project objectives. The key difference with a prize competition is that the winner must deliver, or they do not recieve the prize. If EDS or Capita had been subject to such conditions, it is doubtful they would have profited from failure to the extent they have over the past decade.

As Jeremy Hunt himself said (when challenged by Justin Webb to offer a prize of just £100,000):

We think a million is about the right amount if we’re going to get some serious IT development done, and if we do that we think it could be a lot better value for the taxpayer than the £12 billion pounds spent on the NHS IT system.

Whether £1,000,000 is the right amount is a penetrating question (little wonder it was Justin Webb posing it, rather than any of the professional politicans). The answer depends on an evaluation of what Hunt is actually asking for. If he simply wants Twitter or Facebook with government branding then £1,000,000 does look excessive, and Jenny Willott appears to be correct when she observes:

This prize is…a total waste of taxpayers’ money. There are already a multitude of ways to communicate with large numbers of people online, from Facebook to discussion groups. Maybe the Tories are so out of touch they don’t know what’s out there, but they shouldn’t waste £1m of public money reinventing the wheel.

Unfortunately for Ms. Willott, she’s missed the point. Online communication tools certainly do exist, but they lack a key element needed for the kind of platform Hunt is proposing. James Harkin, a social scientist asked to counter Hunt on the Today programme, observed:

[O]f course the real problem with the wisdom of crowds is that there’s no proven way of aggregating all of those ideas, totting them all up, into a coherent consensus. In other words, you end up with a bureaucrat who’s simply able to pick and choose.

Hunt met that head on:

The trouble at the moment with these online forums is that you don’t know what’s happening with your idea. You post a comment on a government website or the BBC website and it’s sort of vanishing into the ether. What this idea is is can we find a find a way of structuring these ideas so that you give more weight to people who have more expertise or who are recognised as having a better track record in terms of previous ideas they’ve had. I think if we can do that we can actually harness the ideas that people have.

In other words, Harkin (like Jenny Willott) has failed to understand what’s being proposed. Yes, Hunt wants an online platform which shares some characteristics with existing online platfrms, but which adds a new and truly innovative element – a way of sifting, weighting and aggregating input.

Both Tessa Jowell and Kerry McCarthy appear to have ignored that vital detail: Jowell because she views this as being about communication tools; and McCarthy because she ignores the question of how multiple opinions are aggregated and given weight. It may be true, as McCarthy says, that people up and down the country discuss the England football team selection in the pub. This does not explain how you identify the former professional footballers, coaches, and managers from amongst the multitude, and weight their opinions to reflect their proven experience and expertise.

Aggregating opinion is difficult enough, but weighting it to favour experience? There’s nothing around that does that, beyond simplistic tools for other users to rate contributions, or  rewarding contribution (such as used by Yahoo! Answers). Developing systems which can understand what people’s experience is, and evaluate how it relates to the issues being assess, presents considerable challenges across a range of disciplines. Solving those challenges will cost money, and the value of the prize must be sufficient to incentivise the entrants.

Nor is this simply about letting the public make policy, as Simon Jenkins assumes in the Guardian. Justin Webb made a similar, but much better focused point: invoking Margaret Thatcher (as her first Cabinet papers are released) he asked whether this proposal showed a lack of leadership the Iron Lady would never have countenanced. No, says Hunt, because this platform would make the greatest contribution to implementation: developing policy, not originating it.

We’re looking at some the worst things that have gone wrong over the past few years. Look at the U-turns over child care vouchers, over the 10p tax, over the NHS IT system.

It is crazy that these things have gone wrong when you’ve got lots and lots of retired health professionals, retired policemen, people in the teaching profession, who have huge knowledge and expertise and had they been able to contribute better to the policy-making process we could have avoided some of these problems. [Press Association]

The ultimate gimmick of the Blair years was…march[ing] hooligans to cashpoint machines…there will have been thousands of retired police officers or retired people in the courts service who could have said immediately that this is a useless idea and it’s not going to work. [Dailymail.co.uk]

The Today programme’s decision to ask James Harkin to counter Jeremy Hunt was ill-judged. Harkin is a talking head, a university lecturer in social and political theory who has managed to parlay his academic expertise into a number of jobs holding forth on social trends. He is not an expert in the technologies under discussion, and his suggestion on the Today programme that either Twitter or Facebook could deliver the platform Hunt seeks reveals a lack of technical understanding about the challenges inherent in the weighting and aggregating of inputs. (It also shows startling inconsistency – given his own argument against crowd sourcing relies heavily on the inability of existing platforms and environments to aggregate and weight contributions so as to find “correct” answers).

Harkin wrote a book earlier this year in which he argued against “crowd sourcing”. His most timely attack – and frankly, the one which probably got his book published – is on the idea that large groups will in aggregate behave optimally, and he argues that the global financial crisis proved this to be false [That conclusion is questionable, but that's for another day]. He also states that many organisations use mass-engagement as a public relations exercise, something he also said on the Today programme in response to Jeremy Hunt.

I mean, in my experience, researching the book that I wrote, it struck me that lots of organisations were doing this, but often they were doing it simply as a kind of gimmick, often very desperate organisations, which were using this not really as a means to harness the collective intelligence of anyone, but really as a means of cosying up to their public, trying to reinvent themselves by drawing the audience further in. In other words, they were really flattering the intelligence of people by saying we’re listening to your opinions, we really want you to be involved, we want you to be constantly punching in your ideas to us.

This is not a criticism of Jeremy Hunt’s proposal, but it is a caution: government which implements this kind of platform must be prepared to engage properly with it. Tessa Jowell may be right when she says that “Labour already makes full use of collaboration and social networking technologies to consult with people”, but the Greenpeace lawsuit over the Government’s nuclear power consultation demonstrated the extent to which consultation is given lip service by some in government (and this is by no means an exclusively Labour trait). As the old business joke goes, “Being consulted is a time saving measure. You get conned and insulted all in one go”.

More broadly, Simon Jenkins’ piece in the Guardian is another response which ignores what is being proposed – in this case to push direct democracy. He argues for the election of a plethora bodies which are currently minimally democratic or simply appoinbted. In offering this as a reposte to Hunt, Jenkins ignores the extent to which our society already relies on a range of voluntary service which gives weight to individual’s skills and expertise. School governors, lay magistrates, advisory committees, members of the Independent Monitoring Boards; millions of our fellow citizens already provide their skills and expertise free of charge in a variety of roles. What Hunt proposes could turn the whole nation into potential members of an advisory panel, then sift their opinions based on their skills and expertise. Direct democracy might well obviate the need for what Hunt’s proposing, but nobody – left or right – proposes true direct democracy. Whether true direct democracy is even desirable or workable (Switzerland, minarets; California, state bankruptcy) is another issue.

Overall, it is Jeremy Hunt’s critics who fail to convince, largely because they fail to engage. Both the method – a prize competition – and the objective – a platform for public engagement which can weight and aggregate input – have considerable merit. The devil may well be in the detail, but this is one proposal which should be taken forward.

[For Jeremy Hunt's Today programme debate with James Harkin, see here, at 0715]