Peter Diamandis, a serial entrepreneur and founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, recently revealed one of his greatest insights to Business Insider – the best way to inspire others to achieve social progress is through competition for a cash prize.
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An example from the autobiography of Charles Lindbergh, who became the first person to fly across the Atlantic due to a 25 thousand dollar prize, inspired him to send the first private mission to space. His XPRIZE Foundation has held seven successful competitions, and the eighth is currently underway, centered around a moonshot project that competitors are striving to realize, which would otherwise represent too great a risk for companies to undertake on their own initiative.
Moonshot, in a technological sense, is an ambitious, revolutionary research project that aims to be carried out without the expectation of short-term profitability or benefits, and in most cases without complete prior research on potential risks and benefits.
Elon Musk is sponsoring one such XPRIZE competition with a prize of 15 million called the Global Learning XPRIZE, and the winner will be announced in April next year. Diamandis emphasizes that this competition is an ideal example of how the private sector can tackle the world’s greatest challenges. The goal of the competition is to find a simple and cost-effective way to eradicate illiteracy, which Musk considers a source of poverty.
Seven hundred teams in 2014 presented their plans for developing an Android application for tablets that could help extremely poor children learn the basics of mathematics and to read and write.
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XPRIZE awarded all five semifinalists with one million dollars to realize their plans and test them in Tanzania, and Google provided 800 tablets.
The winner will receive 10 million dollars to fully implement their program, and all semifinalists will make their software available to other developers who wish to use it in the form of open source. XPRIZE intends to help the winner distribute their software among 250 million children worldwide.
