Prizing Innovation

The New Republic (Sarah Rahman and Mark Muro, Brookings Institution) - Here’s something interesting: The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and its Economic Development Administration announced something genuinely fresh earlier this week--a competitive challenge grant aimed at calling out the nation’s best ideas for technology commercialization and entrepreneurship...

Here’s the deal: Entitled the i6 Challenge, the new challenge is a $12 million cross-agency innovation competition that will award significant prize money to each of the six teams from across the country with the most-cutting edge ideas to accelerate technology commercialization and new venture formation in their regions. The Economic Development Administration (EDA), the lead agency, will award up to $1 million to each of the winning teams. The other two partners, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes for Health (NIH), have both pledged to award up to a total of $6 million in supplemental funding to their Small Business Innovation Research grantees that partner with i6 Challenge winners. Working together, the three agencies will pool their resources to encourage and reward creative consortia of entrepreneurs, investors, universities, foundations, and non-profits to pursue groundbreaking ideas in technology commercialization and innovation in general....