There are so many instances during our careers/jobs or in daily lives that we starve for a challenging assignment. The work at hand is not aptly cerebral (specially if it's writing PhD Thesis*) and that makes you look for distractions that would send your mind to horizons...
Innovative Innocentive is one such platform offering you plenty of open challenges and who knows you may grow to fame, make worthwhile contributions while bagging lucrative sum in the process. I was informed about it by one of its contest winners - Manish Pande and have been following it quite closely. While not all the problems fall in your area of expertize and hence are difficult to contribute to, the recent challenge The Economist-InnoCentive Human Potential Index Challenge has caught my attention:
The objective of this Challenge is for you to come up with your own metric or index that will capture an important element of society. The metric or index should be relevant to the conference’s main theme of enabling human potential; defined as: how successfully individuals, organizations, and societies are able to unleash intellectual energy and capitalize on it for social and economic progress. While you may not be able to start quantifying your metric or index yet, you should be able to reasonably explain where you would be able to locate the data that you need both now and in the future. You can assume that the creation of some reasonable data collection infrastructure would be possible, though that is beyond the scope of the Challenge. Even though a metric or index could be used to quantify local trends of human potential, it’s more interesting to the Economist to learn about metrics or indices that measure trends at least at the country or regional level, if not at the global level.
Deadline: June 20, 2011
Reward: $10,000
For one, I have recently been curious about economics/Finance as a Technology/micro finance etc. and secondly this is a problem where (in my opinion) everyone can always make a case for himself. What he/she believes as the best for his/her own life and how the world (Governments, Institutions etc.) should conspire to achieve what they believe as most important for their own betterment.
I am sure there would be plenty of mind shattering ideas and although with the uphill task of meeting the Thesis deadline, I hope to brainstorm and come up with one I think as most important for me. If you do...Do not let this opportunity go...Go for It...Good Luck!!!
___________________________________The objective of this Challenge is for you to come up with your own metric or index that will capture an important element of society. The metric or index should be relevant to the conference’s main theme of enabling human potential; defined as: how successfully individuals, organizations, and societies are able to unleash intellectual energy and capitalize on it for social and economic progress. While you may not be able to start quantifying your metric or index yet, you should be able to reasonably explain where you would be able to locate the data that you need both now and in the future. You can assume that the creation of some reasonable data collection infrastructure would be possible, though that is beyond the scope of the Challenge. Even though a metric or index could be used to quantify local trends of human potential, it’s more interesting to the Economist to learn about metrics or indices that measure trends at least at the country or regional level, if not at the global level.
Deadline: June 20, 2011
Reward: $10,000
For one, I have recently been curious about economics/Finance as a Technology/micro finance etc. and secondly this is a problem where (in my opinion) everyone can always make a case for himself. What he/she believes as the best for his/her own life and how the world (Governments, Institutions etc.) should conspire to achieve what they believe as most important for their own betterment.
I am sure there would be plenty of mind shattering ideas and although with the uphill task of meeting the Thesis deadline, I hope to brainstorm and come up with one I think as most important for me. If you do...Do not let this opportunity go...Go for It...Good Luck!!!
* Like it or not, it is one of those necessary evils, you have to accomplish as a PhD candidate and the reason why I would prefer an honorary PhD any day...LoL
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