The incentive isn't to build something that is successful. The point is that the people involved are proving they can A) go through the engineering motions or B) showing the world how they can analyze and draw conclusions from the data where A is for undergrads and B is for grad students.

None of the people working on this are primarily invested in the widget's efficacy (though I'm sure they all would rather see the widget work than not work). The participants are primarily invested in building the widget in the manner they need to to check the boxes required to get their piece of paper that says MIT at the top.

This incentive structure plagues basically every widget that comes out of a university engineering program/lab/department.