Gartner, a leading IT research firm, predicts that "by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud computing service, while 30 percent of them will pay for cloud computing infrastructure." But there's been far less progress in the public sector, according to recent report released by Vivek Kundra, Obama's Federal Chief Information Officer.

Despite recent setbacks, now that BP's efforts to contain the Gulf oil spill have become more successful, focus is shifting to clean-up efforts. The best way to generate innovative, effective clean-up methods is to offer an X Prize for developing such a solution.

The X Prize Foundation awards X Prizes of $10 million or greater for specific technological breakthroughs intended to benefit humanity. The organization is considering a competition "to incentivize the development of rapidly-deployable methods for the clean-up of crude oil along our coastlines and within our oceans."

While not finalized yet, this idea is far more likely to yield working results than the 112,000 ideas sent to BP through its own submission process. In BP's case, there is neither an incentive nor a well-framed challenge to interest researchers.

An incentivized competition is, on the other hand, often far superior to traditional research grants and after-the-fact prizes. Breakthroughs in navigation, chemical engineering, aviation and autonomous vehicle navigation have been driven by and, in turn, inspired by competitions like the X Prize.