Government as venture capitalist? | The Education Report

Government as venture capitalist? | The Education Report

Government as venture capitalist?

By Katy Murphy
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 11:01 pm in school reform.

On the Marketplace radio program this evening, “Freakonomics” co-author Steve Dubner compared the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant competition to innovations and competitive prizes in the private sector.

After talking about the X Prize (slogan: Revolution Through Competition) and Google’s practice of giving engineers a day each week to try out their own ideas — even though most of them flop — Dubner played a tape of the following statement and asked the host, Kai Ryssdal, to guess who the speaker was:

Well we’re fundamentally trying to change the business we’re in and we’re trying to drive innovation rather than being in this compliance-driven bureaucracy. And the idea