Darth Venter – Competition focuses innovation

Out with friends last night I had a conversation with a friend of a friend that struck me as interesting in regard to the concept of competition in science and technology. This guy works on a genetics research project that is run by Harvard and MIT. Of course, I read just enough popular science books and articles to be dangerous, so I immediately asked him about Craig Venter. His reply was a bark of laughter and an acknowledgement, “yes, we call him Darth Venter!”

If you don’t know who J. Craig Venter is, he is one of the people who is at the forefront of mapping the Human Genome using “shotgun sequencing technology (on the right in the picture). His Wikipedia entry mentions that he became “infamous for running a Human genome Project for its own commercial purposes,” (GASP!) From various articles you read about him he sounds like a brilliant, egotistical, and incredibly arrogant person. That’s how he’s described, but bull-headedness is a prerequisite for innovation. In my mind he sounds like an incredibly interesting person.

So I thought it was funny to find out that his competition calls him “Darth,” and it occurred to me how incredibly healthy that is. At the same time he gave him all the attributes of Lord Vader, he also acknowledged that Venter has moved the entire industry forward. Competition is what drives many a new discovery. I just finish reading “The Double Helix” in which James Watson describes the competition to discover and fully explain DNA (incidentally, it’s also credited as one of the first real written works of “popular science”). The book is the description of the multiple teams who are all working on the project in competition (and “co-opetition”), and all of the science department and grant politics that go into controlling who can work on what.

Rich Karlgaard, the Publisher of Forbes (greatest magazine ever) also had a great column last week called, “Why We Need Goofy Contests.” From railroads to rocketry, many advances have come from crazy competitions. Karlgaard points to the success of Burt Rutan and the X-prize, and asks why NASA doesn’t raise it’s paltry $20 million in annual prize/reward money to something more like $2 Billion. It’s a great question. Competition clearly pushes innovation, and what are “token” or “paltry” sums to our government (and arguably wasted they way it’s spent today) could prove to be tremendous motivators for the scientists and engineers of tomorrow.

Just look at the Pentagon sponsored Robot Races in the desert, and the absolute drive and energy it has focused on the robotics industry. Congress has mandated that one third of all military ground vehicles be “unmanned” by the year 2015. One option would be for DARPA to contract a single defense contractor to build robotic vehicles (through a competitive RFP of course). But how much faster will they get there, and how much better will the final solution be because many teams scrapped through a contest that emulates the real-world problem? Faster, better, cheaper. Foster Competition, and you’ll foster innovation.