Cash prizes are becoming a more popular way for organizations to encourage innovation. A McKinsey study of prizes worth more than $100,000 suggests that the aggregate value of such large awards has more than tripled over the past decade, to $375 million. Moreover, the role of prizes is changing: nearly 80% of those announced since 1991 have been designed to provide incentives for specific innovations rather than to reward excellence in general.

Source: Using Prizes to Spur Innovation