Innovation First- What gives?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

I've seen alot of talk about how much the kit costs "in the real world" compared to how much FIRST teams pay. I advise you to take this with a grain of salt. Keep in mind that liquid assets (cash) are not always equal to real assets (the business as a whole).

The world revolves around incentives. If there was no incentive for someone to do something, they simply wouldn't do it. Our official suppliers were given the incentive from FIRST to trade some cash now for a huge pool of graduating engineers in the near future. Money is relatively easy to come by; there will always be people to sell products to. The real value is in the people who make the products. A quality team of motivated engineers are worth their weight in gold to big technology companies. If given the choice between a little bit of cash now or an abundance of quality prospective employees later, I'm will to bet almost every company you asked would take the latter.

Also, how cares how much IFI gets from their contract with FIRST? Leave the conspiracy theories to the guys outside the fence at Area 51. The bottom line is while registration costs roughly the same every year, the quality of the kit and the event becomes progressively better. No matter how much cash IFI gets (or loses) from supporting FIRST, every student is still given the same great experience. $6,000 for an entire team (which may I remind you IS NOT just made up students. Parents and mentors love this stuff, too!) is CHEAP for what we're getting. You can't this kind of deal anywhere else.

[Lil' Lavery]

Many people have always had a problem with the price of the FIRST Robotics Competition, but I can assure you the price of it results in no way from secret price gouging, IFI, or any other loony conspiracy theory. The high price of the competition has led to the creation of lower cost alternatives by FIRST (such as the FIRST Vex Challenge) and other organizations (such as BEST). If by some inane reason you feel that FIRST and/or IFI is ripping you off, I recommend you investigate another competition that may better suit your price range.
Some items from IFI or other suppliers you may find that you actually could make from raw material at a lower cost (provided you have the experience, equipment, time, and resources to do so), but you must factor in the both the labor costs, effort, and time you save by ordering from these suppliers. Also, as previously mentioned, you have to consider the very small niche market these suppliers are providing to. Most of these items have very little use outside the realm of large scale competition robotics (which, especially after the decline in popularity of combat robotics, are few and far between), and these companies get very little business outside of FIRST.

[DCA Fan]

Originally Posted by billbo911

Now as for speaking from a first hand point of view.....Care to elaborate on the above comment?

Anyone who has had to use the Hatch scoring systems software can tell you it was an absolute nightmare to use. Especially for the off-season software, obnoxious popup windows, lack of status icons to tell you that the program was running or that a task had been completed successfully, and buggy scoring/ranking problems made it so, at least for our off-season competition, I was constantly backing up the rankings in Excel and ultimately ran the alliances and finals in Excel instead of the software.

[chris31]

Originally Posted by Covey41

Dave, since you know so much, how about posting the actual contract between FIRST and IFI, and let everyone on Chief Delphi decide?

If there is nothing to hide, it should not be a problem.

Come on, there not going to publicly post a contract.