Cash prizes! Smarter energy?

Looks like Siemens has taken a page from GE’s playbook by launching a large-scale competition to find and fund ideas for a better energy future.

Similar to GE’s ecomagination Challenge, Siemens’ Smart Grid Innovation Contest offers a chance to win both small and large cash prizes, and is open to pretty much anybody with a promising grid-related idea. The Siemens competition kicks off with an online idea contest that’s open to the general public. The winning ideas will then become the focus of a second contest in which university researchers can vie for Siemens’ funding and cooperation to help develop those ideas into real-life, ready-for-market innovations.

In the first phase of the contest, five ideas and three people who offer the best comments on those ideas will share in a total of €15,000 in prize money. After that, the winning calls-for-proposals from universities will be eligible for funding from Siemens’ €1 million investment budget.

GE, meanwhile, has finished taking entries for the second phase of its ecomagination Challenge, focused on improving energy use in homes. It expects to announce the winners in that phase later this spring. (GE’s total budget for its challenge, by the way, amounts to a whopping $200 million.)

Clearly, giant firms like GE and Siemens see the potential for big business rewards for themselves by throwing money at these types of competitions. What will be most interesting to see, though, is whether such contests will ultimately lead to real-world products or services that can make a meaningful dent in our energy consumption habits. That’s the idea, of course, but the results aren’t in yet.