Santa Clara, CA. “Before anything is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea,” said Eileen Bartholomew, senior vice president, prize development, XPRIZE, in a keynote address at DesignCon January 29. Unfortunately, we humans have a difficult time identifying the inflection point that separates “breakthrough” from “crazy,” because we, as humans have done for many thousands of years, live in a world that's local and linear. We know perhaps 150 people, despite however many “friends” we may have online. Our brains, Bartholomew said, haven’t had an upgrade in 50,000 years.
We have trouble recognizing the inflection point between breakthrough and crazy, she said, because initially the difference between, on the one hand, local and linear, and on the other, global and exponential, is very small for the first few steps. A two-foot step plus a two-foot step plus a two-foot step is not drastically different form a one-foot step plus a two-foot step plus a four-foot step, but with successive steps the former linear approach will keep you in your neighborhood while the latter exponential approach will take you around the world—many times.
Bartholomew recounted that Kodak, a $26 billion company that has pioneered digital photography, went bankrupt at about the same time Instagram, with its 13 employees, was purchased for billion dollars—that, she said, represents the new Kodak moment, and one that you want to avoid. Kodak failed to disrupt its own products, so others did.
The goal of XPRIZE, Bartholomew said, is to provide the motivation to develop new kind of business models that will avoid Kodak moments. She noted that Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a prize, forming the basis of the aviation industry we know today.
“Our prizes drive radical breakthroughs that benefit humanity,” she said.
Past prizes include the Ansari XPRIZE, the Progressive Insurance Automotive XPRIZE, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander XCHALLENGE, and the Archon Genomics XPRIZE. Active prizes include the Google Lunar XPRIZE, the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE, and the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE. She added that the organization hopes to launch a global literacy prize this year.
“We set goals that are very measurable, audacious, but achievable,” she said, adding that the prizes rely heavily on private money because challenges such as space travel have traditionally been the domain of governments. As for results being measureable, she likened the XPRIZE competition to a swimming race—not an ice-skating contest.
She added that results must be repeatable—for example, involving reusable spacecraft. “We are in the business of creating new markets—not museum exhibits,” she said.
Bartholomew concluded by asking the audience, “What do you prize? As you wander around the conference and make way home, think of something for me—if you had $10 million, what would you want to incent?”