FIRST PUBLISHED IN POPULAR MECHANICS, MAY 2012
"Breakthroughs come from nontraditional places," X Prize Foundation chairman and chief executive Peter Diamandis said, a way of explaining why Rainn Wilson of NBC's The Office was sitting in a room with Microsoft's Paul Allen.
Allen and Wilson were among the 120 CEOs, scientists, philanthropists, and innovators who sat around a film studio in Los Angeles recently, brainstorming solutions to the world's most vexing problems. They weren't actually tasked with developing any solutions themselves; the weekend brainstorm was intended to hatch ideas for the next X Prize. "People who are experts in an area are often blinded to 'orthogonal thinking," Diamandis said. "An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how something can't be done. A real breakthrough sometimes comes from a naïve question, or someone outside the field that looks at things differently."
X Prizes have challenged inventors to come up with oil-skimming robots, hyper-efficient cars, and moon robots, among other things. The attendees at this event were presented with a broad range of topics—oceans, energy generation, jobs, robotics, education, energy storage, transportation, poverty, natural disasters, poverty, food security, neuromedicine, and bioterrorism, which had been requested by the U.S. government—and then asked to ponder: Where do we need a breakthrough?
Go. Ideas were cast back and forth. At the energy-generation brainstorm, a Washington consultant stood up. "The problem is not that there isn't enough capital to finance breakthrough technologies, it's that the policy signals are so blurry and unpredictable, that the capital cannot be unlocked to scale these technologies." Someone else suggested a prize to build the first carbon-free city. "The problem is power transmission and line loss," another said. A VP at Nintendo, who happens to be Icelandic, proposed devising a low-cost way to harness geothermal energy along the Ring of Fire. Another attendee: "There is zero money going into alternative physics R&D because of the stigma. Physics says its possible but we're not working on it at all!"
Denim-clad entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen interjected then:"We are so Western-centric. Think about this: There are 7 billion people out there now. We all know that about half of them live on less than two bucks a day. Half of that two bucks is spent on some form of energy. If over the next 20 years, the developing world has the 'outrageous' goal of becoming unbelievably prosperous and it goes up to $3 a day, everything you're talking about in North America is irrelevant. You're swatting at the flies while you're getting trampled by the elephant."
A man raised his hand. "I'm going to throw out a wild idea. Most of the world walks. Walking is a form of energy. Can't someone invent a way for the heat to be stored for reuse?"
Unfortunately, no, Kamen said. "Walking on a hard surface is the most efficient form of human transportation. It takes about 22 watts to move at walking speed. If you do anything to take out a little of that, you'd feel like you're walking in mud and you wouldn't do it—it would add inefficiency."
Kamen had more. "There's one more data point you all should consider. We can all talk about how expensive energy is—nominally, make it 10 cents a kilowatt hour. A really good athlete—[say in] crew, where you can use all your muscle groups simultaneously—can put out a few hundred watts for a few minutes before they go anaerobic. It would take 20 of those people to cycle through machines to produce 1,000 watts an hour. So, 20 Herculean athletes, working in beautiful synchronicity—for an hour—make 10 cents of electricity. It's a nonsense argument."
Everyone laughed. Diamandis said, "I love having you around, Dean."
X Prize launched in 1996, with a $10 million competition to build a reusable manned spacecraft, following a long tradition of trying to inspire innovation through incentivized competition. With the Longitude Act of 1714, the British Parliament set up a series of cash prizes to reward the discovery of a way to measure longitude accurately, and thus tremendously improve sea navigation. A 100,000 franc engineering prize was offered by the French Academy in the 18th century to produce soda from seawater; the resulting process became the basis of the modern chemical industry. Hundreds of early aviation prizes boosted aircraft technology; one of them, the 1919 $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, went to Charles Lindbergh.
Since that first Ansari X Prize for spaceflight, won by Burt Rutan in 2004, the X Prize Foundation has launched six other competitions. The Oil Cleanup X Challenge, hatched two years ago at James Cameron's suggestion in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, drew 350 teams. The winners devised an oil skimmer that recovered more than three times as much oil as the industry's previous standard. Last January the X Prize Foundation launched a $10 million Tricorder X Prize calling for a wireless handheld device that monitors and diagnoses health conditions. The idea for that prize came out of one of these annual visioneering sessions.
"Small teams of individuals now have very powerful technologies—of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and robotics—that allow them to take on ambitious goals only government and large corporations could before," Diamandis told PM. "Incentive prizes allow you to crowdsource genius from around the planet."
Flashes of genius could be found throughout the weekend. In one room, Quincy Jones and a Google staffer brainstormed ways to bring jobs back to the music industry. In another, Daniel Kraft, a medical futurist, suggested a prize to create a robot—Dr. R.O.B.E.R.T.S.—that could perform the tasks of an emergency resuscitation and trauma team. "The number one cause of death between ages 0 and 44 is trauma," Kraft said. "The golden hour of getting a patient to resuscitation is critical... With this, the ER comes to you."
In the oceans session, Rainn Wilson called for a portable desalination device powered by wave energy. Someone in the bioterrorism session suggested a print-on-demand type method for vaccine development as a rapid response to global pandemics. The billionaire entrepreneur Naveen Jain proposed a "brain dashboard"—a device that could measure neurological health, giving aging adults an inking about when they're starting to lose it. "The last thing you want is to raise your children to need to change your diapers," he argued.
Barry Thompson, a technologist who has incubated research projects in as varied fields as materials manufacturing, carbon nanotube growth, virtual reality and gaming infrastructure, made a convincing case for a prize that would develop a form of transport that could travel from New York to Sydney in 2 hours. "Air travel hasn't changed significantly in 60 years," he explained. "The [Boeing] 787 is just incremental improvement on what's been done before. The technologies and the tools exist today to make a quantum step forward in airplane design, but in an aerospace there's a policy of incrementalism. When a prize is launched you create a pool of technologies that you can draw from to build this whole new market. And because it's validated in a public setting, R&D investment flows."
At the end of the second day, the 24 best ideas to emerge from each topic session were presented to all the attendees and voted on by text message. Twenty-four were winnowed to five. While pitching his desalination device to the crowd at large, Rainn Wilson gyrated in circles to simulate "the motion of the ocean." Naveen Jain pitched an X Prize that would develop technology for local electricity generation in the world's rural areas; he also pitched the device that can measure brain health. Thompson gave his plea for revolutionizing air travel.
But none was the winner. That honor went to the Ed-U-Phone, a device that helps children learn to read. "Every kid in the world, regardless of socioeconomic status, wants a phone or a connected device," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of game developer Activision Publishing, who pitched the concept. The idea, he explained, is to take phones that would otherwise end up in landfalls in the developed world and put them in the hands of kids in the developing world. Loaded with lessons plans and tests, the phones could be activated only if the student passes a reading test. To keep it activated, he or she must pass more tests.
The idea was wildly popular. Hirshberg was presented with a token trophy—a painting of Burt Rutan's spacecraft over Earth—and the attendees filed out for dinner and drinks.