March 16, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
A recent report by McKinsey & Company’s Social Sector Office on the proliferation of prizes in philanthropy, business, and government raises some questions for foundations, writes Robert Hughes, chief learning officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Writing on Pioneering Ideas, a blog created by the Johnson fund to discuss innovative ideas in health care, Mr. Hughes says the report offers an excellent overview of the growth in prizes. The Johnson foundation itself has been involved in efforts that use prizes to improve health.
Mr. Hughes writes that prize philanthropy still requires better definitions and a better understanding of how it differs from more traditional philanthropic approaches. He also would like to have more details about the downsides of awarding prizes.
“We need much more information than this report provides about risks, difficulties, and failures. The examples of difficulties the report does note — NASA, John Templeton Foundation, and FIRST Robotics — are quite instructive,” he writes.
“In our own experience, we learned a great deal through working with the X Prize Foundation in trying to develop a health prize. We came to appreciate the need to have concrete and easily measureable goals. That need suggests that prizes may not work well for targets that involve getting a large number of people making significant behavioral change, as the measurement and validation structure could get quite costly,” he says.
Read The Chronicle’s article about the McKinsey report.
What do you think of prize philanthropy? When can it work well and when does it not? Click on the comment button below to share your views.
