How to win $1 Million and save the world at the same time

The X-Prize Foundation calls it “revolution through competition”. I call it Super-Size Innovation. What it is: big cash prizes to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges.

Competition-based innovation isn’t a new concept: in 1773 the British government awarded the Longitude Prize to one John Harrison for creating a method of accurately determining a ship’s longitude, a breakthrough which revolutionized navigation and maritime trade.

Today’s emerging generation of philanthropists are raising the stakes - literally - with a new crop of public “innovation challenges”, all offering large purses for everyday innovators who are able to solve some of our most pressing problems: global warming, space travel, clean water, to name just a few. Although the end-goal is the development of viable solutions, innovation challenges also serve to bring attention to the bottlenecks in scientific research.?

Want to outsource (or crowd-source) your extra brainpower to save the world and make a few bucks in the process? Check out this short-list of innovation challenges:

Google Lunar X Prize: Compete to land a privately funded robotic rover on the moon. Caveat: the robot must roam for at least five hundred meters and be able to send video, images, and data back to earth. Prize: $30 million.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge: Competition for the development and implementation of a solution with significant potential to solve the world’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity. Caveat: submissions must exemplify the trimtab principle. Prize: $100k annual prize.

The Virgin Earth Challenge: Demonstrate a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate. Prize: $25 million. Bonus: Weekend on Necker with Sir Richard Branson himself.

Genomics X-Prize: The latest from the folks at the X-Prize Foundation, a competition to be the first team to sequence a human genome in 10 days. Prize: $10 million.

OK, maybe it’s not world changing, but it’s an interesting example of how corporations are outsourcing innovation: Netflix: The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Prize: $1 million.

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