The third of the four, we're going to call it the, the Quest Model.
What do I mean by that?
Think of oh gosh, then, go back go back in time to,
to famous cases, where people have given themselves targets or missions to achieve.
I'm going to give you an example from the world of prizes here.
What you see in that image there is the so-called X Prize.
Now, you may not heard, have heard of the X Prize.
But the X Prize was created about 25 years ago as a means of stimulating
engineers and scientists and inventors, to do difficult or worthwhile things.
So, the image you see there was the first winner of the so
called space X prize, which was a prize given to the first team,
who could actually send a private vehicle out into space, and bring it back, and
repeat the exercise within a couple of weeks.
So, this was created with a view to stimulating innovation.
The objectives of the X Prize were very, very clearly set.
There were very clear things you had to achieve.
However, there was enormous opportunity or
affordance given, to the teams in terms of how they achieved this objective.
By design, they said, we're not going to tell you how we want you to achieve this
objective, we're just going to tell you what the objective is, and
we're going to give a prize to the winner.
So, there's a very extrinsic goal.
It's, it's a, it's a prize.
Now, were they intrinsically motivated?
Well, yes they were, undoubtedly.
But it's based around this idea,
that we're going to have very explicit, tight objectives, the prize.
But we're going to give people enormous latitude in how they address that
particular challenge.
So, that concept of a, of a prize-based approach.
We talked about it a bit earlier in the previous segment, didn't we,
with Top Coder?
We see many organizations nowadays saying to themselves,
how can we define targets or goals in such a way that we actually stimulate people to
come up with crazy new ways of doing them?
We're not going to tell them at all how to do it.
We're going to just tell 'em what it is we're trying to achieve.
So, that's the quest model.
The final model, we're going to call it the discovery model.
And that is loose on both dimensions.
In other words, both the target, the objective is incredibly kind of vague, and
the means by which we get there is also pretty vague.
Julian BirkinshawProfessor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship
