X PRIZE Visioneering and The Mother of All Business Plan Competitions
I spent the weekend, however, participating in a competition that was really different and that promises to change the world. There were so many great ideas that emerged from this that judges said they would fund some of the losers themselves. This was at the X PRIZE Visioneering Workshop, in Beverly Hills, CA. The participants weren’t MBA students; they were a hundred of the greatest engineers, scientists, and thinkers in the world. Many had already built billion-dollar businesses. The attendees included Eric Schmidt (Google), Dean Kamen (Segway inventor), Ratan Tata (Tata Group), Simon Worden (NASA), Aneesh Chopra (U.S. CTO), and Carl Bass (Autodesk)—and some entertainment-industry celebrities such as James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic), Will I Am (Black Eyed Peas), Jim Gianopulos (Fox Studios), and Ali Velshi (CNN). And senior executives of GE, GM, Novartis, Celgene, Shell, Kauffman Foundation, PepsiCo, Qualcomm, and Sprint.
The purpose of the meeting was to brainstorm on what radical innovations can be created over the next two to eight years that will positively affect humanity; to conceive ideas on creating new industries; to challenge the conventional wisdom on what is, and what isn’t, possible. These ideas, documented in the form of a short business plan, will form the basis of new X PRIZE incentive challenges. This is what the X PRIZE Foundation does: it develops ambitious ideas, defines achievable targets, and challenges entrepreneurs to create innovative solutions to implement them. And it offers millions of dollars in bounties to those who succeed.
More than a billion people in the developing world face shortages of drinking water. Given the rate at which water tables are being depleted, the situation is becoming dire. Jeff’s idea was to develop a small, affordable device that works without the electricity grid (many villages in the developing world don’t have access to electricity) and extracts water from human and other organic waste.
Another team proposed the development of a “Digital Doctor”. This would comprise an expert system, running on a mobile computer or a tablet device, that can be operated by a minimally educated, minimally trained person. Its goal is to accurately diagnose the most common diseases (e.g. respiratory diseases, water-borne illnesses) that are prevalent in different regions of the world.
There were dozens of great ideas. Some were really far out, such as the concept of a point-to-point transportation system that would shuttle people from, say, Manhattan to Newark airport—through the air. Others were wishful, like an advanced jet that can get from Los Angeles to Sydney in four hours by taking an orbital route. Some were low-tech, like creating a recipe book for autocratic governments to transform into democracies. But all were truly out–of-the-box and revolutionary.
If the X PRIZE Foundation publishes the ideas, why are incentives necessary, you may ask? After all, aren’t there enough entrepreneurs out there who are motivated to solve the world’s problems and who can see the financial advantage? And don’t venture capitalists see the big opportunities?
It is very possible that some of the of the technologies we discussed over the weekend will come to fruition and change the lives of billions; that investments of a few million dollars will do more good for the world than the billions that are invested in the me-too social media technologies that Silicon Valley is so excited about. My hope is that more of world’s greatest minds do what some did last weekend: brainstorm to save our civilization.
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Faculty and Advisor, Singularity University, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @wadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.