Each year we have this Technorosh contest in the Technion (where I study for my degree now). It's a contest of giving a creative, engineered solution for an invented problem. The problems till now were "Safely dropping an egg off a 9 storey building" or "Pouring wine to a glass from behind a pool and a slope". Creative, entertaining and quite useless as a problem on its own. (The enthusiasm around the contest is another story - this creates a great positive effect as I see it).
I have 2 problems with this:
1) The problem is fake. If so many people invest so much time, why not solve a real problem? Don't we have enough of them in our world around us?
2) The whole concept of a competition is counter productive. Instead of cooperating on finding a creative solution to a problem, use the collective mind and reach really high - the groups compete and reach solutions that are probably less than optimal from what they could have reached if they had cooperated.
The solutions?
1) Choose a real problem, like making the environmental footprint of the Technion's campus smaller. The solutions can save money in the short and long terms, serve as models for other places, and achieve a real impact in many aspects.
2) The prize will be 20% of the prooved cost reductions to the technion, and will be distributed between everybody - so people will be incouraged to cooperate in order to make the prize bigger, and get more money. The winners will take 10% of the prize, and the rest will be distributed between the rest of the groups.
Does this make any sense?
This looks to me more win-win in nature than the previouse Technorosh contests.
Oh well,
Eitan.
