• Blog post from Kiva’s Matt Flannery. http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/kiva-chronicles/archive/2008/07/16/farewell-mr-capstick
  
• SSIR Article on the failure of Social Venture Partners in the Bay Area: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/profiting_from_failure/
• Blog on one VC that talks about his failure rate and what he’s learned: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/30/vcs-whats-your-failure-rate/
• Philanthropy 2173 talks about the links between innovation and failure in the consumer products space – how could this apply to philanthropy? http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2008/05/measuring-failure.html
• Bessemer Venture Partners – perhaps the oldest VC firm in the United States – publishes an anti-portfolio: http://www.bvp.com/Portfolio/AntiPortfolio.aspx

"... it occurs to me that you might like to see a new paper I just finished on the history and use of prize incentives for R&D. I think results quite consistent with your earlier “Catalyzing Creativity through Competition” paper. The main novelty is that now we have a vastly larger database of historical competitions which we can link to technological breakthroughs in various fields, and I think a nice set of guidelines for what history tells us about which kind of prize works best, under various circumstances.

• I’ll avoid attachments – a link directly to the paper is here: http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/staff/masters/MastersDelbecq_AcceleratingInnovation_RevJune2008.pdf
• You can also see the link in context at the top of the “current research” section of my general website: http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/staff/masters/#prizes

After this, my current big project on this is laboratory experimental on how people respond to different kinds of contests, especially to compare prizes that are proportional to success with traditional winner-take-all contests. So far we have pilot results from last Spring semester, getting ready for full-scale experiments when students return in the Fall. Amazing stuff, could be of much real-world value to philanthropists who are interested in market-like incentives."
Dr. William Masters, Purdue University