Leveraging the Collective Brain: The First Clear Asset ETF Contest is Done
And it was a big success. Clear Asset’s CEO, Andrew Corn, wrote a detailed post on the contest and announced the winners on his blog. He received dozens of submissions, many of which were of extremely high quality. I know that selecting the first place winner was an extremely difficult task for Andrew and his portfolio management team. And this first test case was limited to three schools - Columbia, Lehigh and NYU. Clear will be expanding this universe in the next contest as they now understand how to manage, assimilate and analyze a large volume of ideas, and I can’t imagine how many great ideas they’ll garner the next time around.
I am eager to see which ETF distributors license the winning ideas; it will be the ultimate proof that the brainpower and creativity resident within our university communities is a vast and underutilized resource. I had written about Clear’s innovative approach to soliciting commercially-viable ideas for their index business when the contest was first launched, and believe that their original thesis was validated through the contests’ success. Congratulations to the first place winner, James Baker of NYU, the other contest winners and the entire Clear Asset team. You’ve broken some new ground here in the financial services realm. We’ll see if others follow your lead.
