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The recent rise of incentivized competitions for humanity has prompted me to create this thread, to tell PFers what's out there and to share my meager experience in "almost" entering one.
The largest and arguably most influential one has been the XPRIZE organization which finds sponsors and puts out many competitions to solve some of our worst problems. Its a competitive game with many teams worldwide competing for the bragging rights to a first prize.
Often the cost of competing exceeds whatever prize money is offered but teams persist in the hope of getting greater rewards later through sponsorship and perhaps even establishing a new company or industry.
More on the history of XPRIZE is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation
My Experience
A few months ago,I was considering entering the XPRIZE Natural Disaster Challenge. The goal was to design a competition, that's right to design a competition where you're competing with other designers around the world. Basically, XPRIZE was outsourcing their competition designs. There were 5 challenge areas to consider and I chose the Natural Disaster Challenge. Herox.com is the place to go to learn more:
https://www.herox.com/xprizevisioneers-2018-design-challenge
The Natural Disaster Challenge endgame was to find a competition written according to XPRIZE guidelines that they could host and find sponsors for. In this case, we were to imagine some device or algorithm or something that could predict natural disasters. We got to select the natural disaster and we got to write the requirements that would be used to judge entries to the competition.
They used the Ansari Space XPRIZE as an example and a template of how you should write your entry. In that prize, they had requirements that said the winner had to be able to take three people into space up to a minimum of 62 miles - 100 km and back and then do it again with the same vehicle in two weeks time.
For my effort, I kept trying to actually design the winning entry of the competition I was designing and then decided this isn't going to work well. I also discovered that they had a shark tank component to the competition where you pitched your competition to some entrepreneurs and they would either sponsor it or rip it to shreds.
I didn't like that part at all as I hate how these entrepreneurs operate. So many times I've seen good products get trashed or the inventor gets hoodwinked by the entrepreneur or the funding falls through later on. Reality TV shows are not reality for these great inventors.
The end result is I did not enter due to the licensing issues with work and due to the shark tank approach.
In Summary
I would encourage you all to look into these competitions to see what you can do to help humanity solve these intractable problems. I think it's a worthy cause and whether you enter or not, it's still great that you invested some time to learn about them and maybe someday you will find a novel solution that can make a difference.
Jedi
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the remainder of the thread I'd like to post various competitions that I've found so far and would encourage others here to share the competitions they know about.
In the wikipedia article on XPRIZE several other competitions past and present were listed and are worthy of some investigation:
See also:
The largest and arguably most influential one has been the XPRIZE organization which finds sponsors and puts out many competitions to solve some of our worst problems. Its a competitive game with many teams worldwide competing for the bragging rights to a first prize.
Often the cost of competing exceeds whatever prize money is offered but teams persist in the hope of getting greater rewards later through sponsorship and perhaps even establishing a new company or industry.
More on the history of XPRIZE is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation
My Experience
A few months ago,I was considering entering the XPRIZE Natural Disaster Challenge. The goal was to design a competition, that's right to design a competition where you're competing with other designers around the world. Basically, XPRIZE was outsourcing their competition designs. There were 5 challenge areas to consider and I chose the Natural Disaster Challenge. Herox.com is the place to go to learn more:
https://www.herox.com/xprizevisioneers-2018-design-challenge
The Natural Disaster Challenge endgame was to find a competition written according to XPRIZE guidelines that they could host and find sponsors for. In this case, we were to imagine some device or algorithm or something that could predict natural disasters. We got to select the natural disaster and we got to write the requirements that would be used to judge entries to the competition.
They used the Ansari Space XPRIZE as an example and a template of how you should write your entry. In that prize, they had requirements that said the winner had to be able to take three people into space up to a minimum of 62 miles - 100 km and back and then do it again with the same vehicle in two weeks time.
For my effort, I kept trying to actually design the winning entry of the competition I was designing and then decided this isn't going to work well. I also discovered that they had a shark tank component to the competition where you pitched your competition to some entrepreneurs and they would either sponsor it or rip it to shreds.
I didn't like that part at all as I hate how these entrepreneurs operate. So many times I've seen good products get trashed or the inventor gets hoodwinked by the entrepreneur or the funding falls through later on. Reality TV shows are not reality for these great inventors.
The end result is I did not enter due to the licensing issues with work and due to the shark tank approach.
In Summary
I would encourage you all to look into these competitions to see what you can do to help humanity solve these intractable problems. I think it's a worthy cause and whether you enter or not, it's still great that you invested some time to learn about them and maybe someday you will find a novel solution that can make a difference.
Jedi
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the remainder of the thread I'd like to post various competitions that I've found so far and would encourage others here to share the competitions they know about.
In the wikipedia article on XPRIZE several other competitions past and present were listed and are worthy of some investigation:
See also:
- DARPA Grand Challenge
- Elevator:2010
- Global Security Challenge
- H-Prize
- Inducement prize contest
- L Prize
- Methuselah prize
- Orteig Prize (historical prize that influenced Peter Diamandis of XPRIZE)