Further elaboration: a financial award is a great way to tempt an innovator out of their risk adverseness: it says, you can quit your job or whatever and not ri

Further elaboration: a financial award is a great way to tempt an innovator out of their risk adverseness: it says, you can quit your job or whatever and not risk much if your innovation is valuable. The ideal startup person is someone who already has the idea and knows its good but doesn't want to take the risk without some kind of reward to justify it. But if the rewards get big enough, you get reward seekers without any fundamental idea who are just going to sit around trying to come up with them until they find one someone is going to bite on. These two populations of people are totally different and only one of them actually cares about the product or making the world a better place.