Keep your eye on the PRIZE

Another exciting season of the Seattle Science & Technology Discovery Series is underway. During the season opener on September 14th, Discovery Series members were amazed by Dr. Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and his research in suspended animation. We learned just a week later that Dr. Roth was chosen to receive a prestigious MacArthur Fellow award for this revolutionary work.

The October 12th breakfast featured X PRIZE Foundation President Tom Vander Ark, who shared his organization’s approach to promoting innovation by appealing to the competitive spirit.

The X PRIZE Foundation establishes global competitions laying out specific targets designed to encourage breakthrough innovations that benefit humanity. Vander Ark described the power of prizes to create new industries and reshape existing ones, noting that there was a long and storied history behind this approach to stimulate ground-breaking human achievements. Through competitions like the Archon Genomics X PRIZE, to be awarded to the first team to sequence 100 genomes in 10 days, and the Google Lunar X PRIZE, earmarked for the successful launch, landing and operation of a lunar rover complete with a “mooncast” back to Earth, the Foundation is capturing people’s imagination while accelerating the development of scaleable solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges in a variety of sectors.

Did you know...?

• The use of prizes has proven to be a powerful motivator in the past. Charles Lindbergh made his historic 1927 flight from New York to Paris to win the Orteig Prize, which was established by Raymond Orteig in 1919 to reward the first aviator to complete the journey non-stop between the two cities.
• The Foundation’s first competition, the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE, was put up for grabs in 1996 to the first team to successfully fly a three-person, reusable spacecraft to a 100 kilometer altitude twice in two weeks. Mojave Aerospace Ventures won the prize in 2004 with its SpaceShipOne.
• X PRIZEs are highly leveraged and encourage private investment in innovation. Teams vying for the Ansari prize spent more than $100 million in private funds trying to win the competition.

Podcasts of the presentations of both Dr. Roth and Tom Vander Ark are available on the Technology Alliance web site.