How to Avoid Another Solyndra

While the Obama administration is under fire for funding solar panel disaster story Solyndra, a Yale professor has another idea: stop funding risky ideas, and start rewarding innovative successes:

Dr. Pogge has proposed the creation of an Ecological Impact Fund, [which] would explicitly link the accessibility of an innovation to its value…

While much green technology today is financed through “push” funding, with governments and grant-making organizations deciding who should receive money, the Ecological Impact Fund would shift the model to market-based “pull” funding that rewards the most successful innovators.

Financed by participating national governments, the fund would rank companies that sign up on the basis of the ecological impact, or benefit, of their innovation. The criteria for judging innovations would be established by a panel of experts from the public and private sectors. Each year, innovators would receive a return based on their ranking, and a product would remain in the reward pool for 10 years.

Read the rest of the New York Times piece here.