Financing climate innovation: WRI and the bounty system
Last week the World Resources Institute (WRI) posted a challenge on Innocentive , the online innovation reward website, offering cash prizes to individuals for solutions to climate change adaption issues. There is a total of $10 000 up for grabs if you can articulate a clear and actionable vision for climate change communication strategies in vulnerable communities. WRI’s approach adds to the broader debate on how you finance climate innovation . There’s much discussion concerning how to deploy money into existing technologies and ideas, but how do you best put money into creating new technologies and ideas? In issues of strategic concern, governments have frequently used grants , for example, to support universities and research institutes to develop new ideas and technologies. That has the advantage of giving innovators space to develop ideas without an immediate need for commercialisation. On the other hand, government grants risk being too prescriptive: What if the government choos...