Challenges

Is it just me, or is there a surge of "challenges" / "competitions" / "contests" of all kinds and colors lately? It appears to be a very cheap way to get people working for you (or for your objectives). So you need to boost your business and you don't have good ideas yourself and/or the capabilities to realize them? No problem, start a "hey-give-me-your-ideas"-challenge! Hopefully a number of good ideas will emerge and eventually you can take advantage of many of those ideas while "paying" only the winner, who probably spent a lot more time on it than you have to pay him for (if there is any price money involved at all).
Don't get me wrong, I do like the general idea of these challenges, and in particular I like participating - for example in the yearly Copernicus Masters Challenge. But the balance between how much effort the participants put into it and the actual rewards needs to be fair. Anyway, just my two cents on that topic (and maybe this year I'll make it to the finals :-) ).