On Prizes, Entrepreneurialism and Bologna

Bologna trundles on…

An increasingly globalised graduate workforce is putting increasing pressure on universities to create unified, portable qualifications. Europe responded in 1999 with a plan to create a European higher education area and increase the mobility of students, researchers and university staff by 2010. The Bologna process, as it is called after the city where the plan was first agreed, is a voluntary...

News, awards and prizes

In a new study published in Cerebral Cortex, Senior Researcher Jens Hjortkjær together with colleagues from the Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance (DRCMR) demonstrated a method to decode listeners’ brain activity patterns to determine what sound source a person is listening to. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record neural activity while participa...

Entrepreneurialism and private higher education in Europe

Inducement Prizes and Innovation

We examine the effect of prizes on innovation using data on awards for technological development offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England at annual competitions between 1839 and 1939. We find large effects of the prizes on competitive entry and we also detect an impact of the prizes on the quality of contemporaneous patents, especially when prize categories were set by a strict rota...

Incentives , prizes , and innovation