New Report on a White House / Case Foundation Conference: Promoting Innovation

I am delighted to announce that the Case Foundation has just released a new report that I wrote about a recent White House / Case Foundation conference. The report is called Promoting Innovation: Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking. Here’s the Foundation’s description:

In spring 2010, the Case Foundation together with the White House Domestic Policy Council and the White House Office on Science and Technology Policy teamed up to host a daylong public-private strategy session focused on promoting innovation through the use of prizes, challenges and open grantmaking. . . . This report is a summary of the lessons, learnings and findings discussed at the conference, and highlights some of the shining examples of the power and pitfalls of crowdsourcing ideas and innovation.

Case Foundation CEO Jean Case wrote a blog post introducing the report, in which she says:

We’re proud today to release a new report as part of our “Case Studies” from the spring gathering, Promoting Innovation: Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking, a daylong strategy session we co-hosted along with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Domestic Policy Council. This event brought together over 200 individuals representing more than 35 government agencies and 35 private sector and nonprofit organizations to discuss lessons and strategies from experiments in prizes, challenges and open grantmaking.

The Promoting Innovation report is meant for anyone who may have missed the conference, or wants to share some of the chief learnings with colleagues who weren’t able to attend.

The White House has posted a piece on the report, too, on the blog of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. That blog bost calls the meeting “groundbreaking” (it was) and points out the section of the report that contains five dos and don’ts of using prizes and challenges for leveraging resources and driving change.

I could not be more pleased about this report, and I am grateful to the Case Foundation and to the White House for making it possible.