Competition: it's the life's blood of the American economy. So how about a contest to help solve one of the country's most intractable problems -- the jobs crisis that has left more than 20 million Americans out of work or underemployed?
That's the notion behind the Job Raising Challenge, a new contest that McKinsey, along with our partners the Huffington Post, the Skoll Foundation, and CrowdRise, has launched to surface innovative ideas to get people back to work. We're searching for non-profits who help to create jobs -- organizations doing everything from retraining workers and closing the skills gap to providing interview suits for job applicants who can't afford one themselves. The contest will help raise money and awareness for these job-creators -- and the Skoll Foundation has put up $250,000 to reward the winning organizations.
The Job Raising Challenge is the latest example of how competitive challenges are playing a growing role in developing innovative solutions to entrenched societal problems. In June, for example, Bloomberg Philanthropies pledged $9 million to fund the Mayors Challenge, a contest to find the best ideas from local governments to solve the common challenges they face.
In our 2009 study, And the Winner is..., McKinsey observed a renaissance in competitions: they were growing rapidly in number and size and appearing in new forms. A wider range of sponsors was also emerging, eager to apply competitions to a broader swath of societal objectives. The trend has only intensified in the past three years. Competitive challenges have become an even more popular approach to finding innovators and connecting them with real-time problems and the institutions committed to solving them.
Since we published that report, a number of important shifts have occurred in the sector. First, the institutions sponsoring challenges today increasingly want to use rewards to inspire new achievements, rather than to recognize old ones. Philanthropists and nonprofit institutions are moving away from what had once been the default position: creating yet another exemplar prize recognizing the best achievement or insight in a discipline.
Now competitions are seen as an excellent way to inspire and share high-potential yet low visibility ideas -- and often several at once. Great examples and platforms abound. Ashoka Changemakers, for instance, runs a variety of compelling social challenge prizes geared towards connecting great ideas with funders rather than celebrating a single "winner."
Second, local, regional, and national governments all over the globe are more active in awarding -- and competing for -- funding over the past three years. The Obama Administration launched Challenge.gov in April 2010 as a one-stop shop "where entrepreneurs and citizen solvers can find public-sector prizes." A number of US government agencies launched challenges in 2011; thanks to the COMPETES legislation, departments including Health & Human Services, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs now sport their own competitions. In the UK, the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA) -- a private foundation that started off as a government think tank -- has created several prizes to support innovation in local governments and communities.
In some ways this is a return to roots. From the UK's Longitude Prize, famously won by the savant clockmaker John Harrison, to France's Food Preservation Prize, which led to modern canning techniques, governments once relied on competitions as a critical tool for getting things done. Since 2009, we have seen a creative resurgence in public sector prize-giving. Governments have rediscovered competitions as tools that can go beyond grant-making, intellectual property rights and contracting to overcome technological barriers, generate bold ideas and, in some cases, even change behavior.
Finally, many new challenges have shifted the focus from the size of the prize to the award process itself. In 2009, we identified this as one of the more powerful and under-recognized attributes of competitions: their ability to change behavior and enrich the participants who engage in a contest. NESTA, for example, created a unique process that was heavy on technical assistance for competitors, including a "camp" that brought together council governments to share ideas and improve their entries. NESTA's emphasis on the competitive process -- and its willingness to invest in it -- didn't just improve the quality of submissions. It also strengthened the skills and capabilities of local councils, making them more likely to generate and follow through on pioneering ideas in the future.
That shift reflects a growing awareness that the most successful competitions are often not the ones with the heftiest purse. In many cases, the biggest social impact comes from encouraging a lot of people to compete rather than identifying a single winner. Indeed, the appeal of creating competitions like the Job Raising Challenge to solve problems lies in a simple concept: by calling in ideas from anyone, anywhere, you increase the wealth of ideas from which to choose. And at the same time, you boost the chances of hitting on a once-in-a-lifetime answer to some of our generation's most pressing challenges.
Follow Lynn Taliento on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lynntaliento
Demand is the only thing that can create jobs. No President or government has ever created ANY jobs. Stimulus funds, incentives and bailouts may prevent the loss of jobs - at taxpayer expense, but they don't "create" anything. At the same time, tax cuts or scaling back regulations do not create any jobs.
To solve our current economic challenges by creating jobs we need to focus on demand - aggregate demand and unmet demand. Aggregate demand is simply the sum of purchasing power (income) of those employed. With some 20 million people unemployed or underemployed, aggregate demand is at an all time low. Political magic won't change that. The only thing that will is "unmet demand." Unmet demand can create jobs if businesses can meet that demand.
There are several major instances of unmet demand in the US including clean AFFORDABLE energy, affordable urban living, reliable agriculture production and affordable new schools. These areas have unmet demand that can create more than 10 million jobs in the short term.
Our only way out of the current situation is to define the unmet demand and create ways to meet that demand - not with subsidies or tax cuts, but with innovation/invention. I suggest solving some of our greatest challenges can create plenty of jobs.
My work is here: http://www.solutioneur.com
A short Intro is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj3Zc-SF0YE
Best of all, American made products would cost, for the most part, exactly the same as they do now in the US, but the cost of foreign made goods would go up. Since foreign production is not subject to payroll taxation, they get a break under our current taxing scheme. Enact a national consumption tax and the burden of taxation falls harder on foreign made goods because they are currently not being taxed. And oh by the way, its almosts like a tariff, but since it isn't a tariff, nobody can protest it.
And even better, the cost of US made products sold overseas would actually drop. How much? not sure, but every little bit can help.
That's the problem of joblessness in a nutshell. The problem of our lifetime isn't joblessness: it's population control.
Frankly, this is a myth.
American reality is starkly different as businesses are constantly on the march to oligopoly and monopoly positions. There are countless historical examples from railroads, oil companies, computers, phone companies, media companies, newspapers, recording companies to banks. No business wants to compete, it's simply bad for business.
""The Job Raising Challenge is the latest example of how competitive challenges are playing a growing role in developing innovative solutions to entrenched societal problems.""
Competitive challenges (i.e. a free market) and such are playing the role of deflection and in doing so, gives the designed impression that massive unemployment is the problem of the unemployed individuals and not the abject failure of government economic policies. The "competitive" aka deregulated, aka free market, aka entrepreneurial America business first paradigm brought us to this dismal place and nothing else.
There are NO market solutions to massive unemployment and poverty, by definition.
The world knows exactly how to create jobs as it has been proven out both in theory and in the crucible of the real world many times over. The current ruling elite refuse to invoke the policies to do so, instead, choosing to further undermine the economy. This is greatest entrenched societal problem of all.
I wish you all the best with the project.
You do that and you free up productive investment, which has been increasingly supplanted for around 10 years now by expansive government spending as reflected in the national spending accounts.
Net private investment - capital investment beyond repair & replace spending- is the font of productive growth. It has shrunk as a % of annual GDP by about the same as government spending has increased. Government spending destroys wealth.
We are effectively eating our seed-corn, with disastrous results now and coming in the future.
Sound awful? Consider this: agriculture in the US used to employ around 98% of the population, most of whom grew just enough to feed their families. Now, 2% of the US population feeds the US and much of the world.
Was it a bad thing for all those jobs in agriculture to be lost?