Excerpt:
While innovation prizes can be a low-cost way to generate great ideas, they're also fraught with potential legal and HR headaches. Hsieh and Jouret wanted to ensure participants retained ownership of their ideas if they weren't chosen as the winner. They had other matters to consider, including making sure an idea truly belongs to the contestant and that a winner isn't found to be a convicted felon. So Cisco hammered out ways to prevent fraud and notified candidates that they'd have to go through background checks if they made it past the semifinals.
Not everything went according to Cisco's plan. Initially, the I-Prize site let contestants vote on each other's ideas, à la news-rating site Digg. But then executives discovered that some contestants were trying to game the system. So Cisco decided not to use the community voting mechanism to influence the selection of semifinalists and finalists.
The big challenge in some innovation competitions is making the prize difficult enough that real innovation can be achieved, but not so difficult that the prize can't be won. The larger the challenge, the more likely people will try and fail.
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