Trails Advisory Committee Member
Jaison Morgan is the CEO of Common Pool. He has been recognized by the BBC as “the world’s expert” in designing prizes to drive innovative breakthroughs. He helped establish a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study how targeted rewards can be used to induce new solutions to engineering challenges. He has served as an Advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of the First Minister of Scotland, and the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, the European Commission, and other public and private partners to counsel their use of competitions for solving large-scale problems.
Today, he leads the Common Pool team, an agency that focuses exclusively on creatively engineering incentive-based programs. Those programs include a competition to assist the NASA Mars Landing Mission, to open-source the development of new technologies to expand extra-terrestrial in situ resources aboard planetary facilities. Most recently, Common Pool has been responsible for the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change, offering a single $100 million grant (USD) that is the largest open-competition program ever launched. Jaison completed graduate studies at the University of Chicago. He is a frequent lecturer on the subject of incentive engineering and challenge competitions, and he is a serial entrepreneur who has spent his career on building companies that serve the public and leverage technologies to expand solutions to common causes. You are welcome to view his TEDx talk, to learn more about the history and some current trends when adopting these programs: https://youtu.be/NyOaoIcCeMY