I have no problem with competition nor open research, which is probably how the researchers viewed this competition. My problem was how strikingly small the rew

I have no problem with competition nor open research, which is probably how the researchers viewed this competition. My problem was how strikingly small the reward was for custom tailoring months of their efforts and research towards helping a single company eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs and save billions of dollars. The top prize wasn't even enough budget for a lab assistant for a year! It sounds more like an evil plot from a sinister villain than it does an interesting research opportunity. If you want to do interesting research, don't let multinational companies with obvious agendas tell you what is interesting unless they are also willing to share the reward that they get from your hard work.