Both the software and pharmaceutical industries are experiencing ongoing problems with hampered innovation due to burdensome patent law. In 2007, Médecins Sans Frontières created a new innovation inducement prize for tuberculosis that gave a proportion of the prize money to any researchers who produced open work that contributed to the winning product. The idea was to encourage more openly shared research in an industry that is increasingly incentivized to keep its work secret. This is a funding model that could potentially be adapted for the development of open source software.
