As health professional education has developed as an academic discipline, there has been a focus on grants and awards (G&A) as tools to promote innovation and the pursuit of excellence. In this article, I will contend that this approach has at least as many harmful as helpful consequences and suggest that, on the whole, we would be better off without G&A. The G&A approach to promoting innovation is, obviously, a competitive process. Those who advocate it appear, perhaps without even fully realizing it, to believe that competition is always good. This belief appears to be a product of the free market paradigm that began with Scottish philosopher Adam Smith in the Eighteenth Century. Smith (1776, p. 758) argued that if everyone in a society pursues their own interests, in a pure market, then the interests of all will ultimately be served through the action of what he famously called “the invisible hand”. The resurgence and amplification of these ideas with the global advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, has led us to a current environment where, almost, the only way it is possible to view any human endeavor is through the lens of the market. How often do we hear our colleagues talk about the “health industry” or the “education industry?” Deans often talk about “business models” for particular university activities, while vice chancellors focus on their institutions’ place in league tables and performance against their so-called “competitors”.