Diamandis was initially slow to appreciate X Prize’s camera-friendly aspect. The SpaceShipOne footage was coproduced by the Discovery Channel and a company started by Rutan’s backer, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen; the X Prize Foundation was not involved. Going forward, Diamandis has left nothing to chance, as the reality producers found out. “X Prize,” he assured them, “maintains and owns all media rights around all the teams,” who are further obligated to film their activities “on a regular basis and generate content” on their own time and dime.
Competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize, MicroSpaces spoked-wheel vehicle
Image courtesy of Andrew Collins/X Prize Foundation
“It’s important not just to award a prize purse but also to award fame and celebrity,” explains Cristin Lindsay, the foundation’s vice president of prize management, “because part of what we’re trying to do is move big markets and big industries.” There are other purposes to such storytelling. One is inspiring the public, particularly young people, and igniting enthusiasm for science, technology, and discovery. It also builds the X Prize brand: The prize generates buzz, a competitive advantage for the foundation that a federal agency or philanthropic endowment or angel investor cannot match. And it helps Diamandis raise money from sponsors, who can insert their names and logos into all the coverage. That striking, candy-strewn moment aboard SpaceShipOne was in a sense bought by M&Ms, which cosponsored the competition (although Melvill claims he didn’t discuss the stunt with anyone in advance).
It’s important not just to award a prize purse, Cristin Lindsay says, but also “to award fame and celebrity, because part of what we’re trying to do is move big markets and big industries.”
The Automotive X Prize was conceived as a sales race, to emphasize the importance of designing marketable cars, Lindsay says, but that’s “boring to the media.” Instead, the goal shifted to performance, as measured in an array of time trials and races in “multiple media markets.” (New York City is to kick off the drama this fall.) These should ultimately produce two winners, one in each of two vehicle classes, which will help expand the exposure beyond the winner’s circle. “I’m looking for a new generation of cars to come out of the X Prize,” Lindsay says.
Packaging the genome prize was even more daunting: Ten days in a lab just does not scream blockbuster. So Diamandis took a cue from the magazines at the supermarket checkout. The winning team will have the chance to decode the genomes of 100 celebrities. What genes make an athlete, a genius, a beauty? Inquiring minds, Diamandis is betting, will want to know.
But will they? The X Prize succeeds on Diamandis’s terms only if it institutes —that is to say, normalizes—revolutionary change. But news is by definition novel, and the bar for capturing attention seems to keep rising. It is hard to imagine any feat, no matter how heroic, that might make the world stand still, as Lindbergh’s did 80 years ago; and it is easy to imagine the public’s appetite for heroic feats diminishing as their number increases. When I spoke to Diamandis in 2007, he didn’t seem to have considered the notion of prize fatigue. A year later, though, he allowed that something like that has crossed his mind. “Our thinking is, there should be no more than 10 to 12 prizes at a time,” he now says. “Otherwise it gets a little too confusing.”
The X Prize is often described as a technology contest, but on close inspection, the winning achievements do not seem all that revolutionary, technologically speaking. The hardware required to win the first space prize, Diamandis confided one day, had been around for at least five years. Similarly, while the giant Indian automaker Tata Motors and Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors are both designing cars that may compete for the Automotive X Prize, these are vehicles that would have been built with or without the contest. In genomics, the true breakthrough belongs to Venter and the scientists at the Human Genome Project. “What we’re targeting is something that would happen anyway,” said Michael Lindsay, who helped develop the genomic X Prize (and is Cristin Lindsay’s husband). “I think we’re just really accelerating it.”
The X Prize Foundation’s true impact may be better measured by the markets it opens. That is how Whittaker views it. “The challenge is at or beyond belief state and then it is achieved, and that transforms the view of what the world considers possible,” he says. “But it also seeds this transformational industry. The start-up and the prize pale by comparison with the scale of the wealth of the follow-on enterprise.”
Whittaker points to the gaming industry, which emerged from technology used to develop a computer that could play chess better than a Russian champion; Deep Blue, before it was nurtured by IBM, was Deep Thought, a program developed by Carnegie Mellon researchers in a bid to win the $100,000 Fredkin Prize. “Gaming as an industry is now challenging broadcast television, moviemaking, and industries that you’d guess were absolutely unshakable,” he says.
“This is all about changing paradigms,” Diamandis tells me late one Friday afternoon. “It’s about bringing the players together, it’s about bringing the visibility, it’s about changing consumer expectations and buying habits, it’s about bringing the capital to the markets.” He points out that the number of U.S. airline passengers grew from 6,000 to 180,000 only one year after Lindbergh’s flight. “Lindbergh and the Orteig Prize are credited with creating today’s $300 billion aviation industry,” he says. Similarly, he suggests, the space tourism industry that will arise as a result of the Ansari X Prize could one day be worth up to $1.5 billion a year.
In the meantime, the next generation of X Prizes is taking shape at the foundation’s new headquarters just down the coast in Playa Vista. The foundation has grants from companies, government agencies, and other foundations to develop eight new prizes, including competitions involving health care, tuberculosis, and alternative aviation fuels. Diamandis says he would like to tackle global poverty, education, and cancer, too. But it has been slow going: Over the past couple of years, the organization does not seem to have made much progress refining many of these ideas. On poverty, “we’ve probably tested 30 different ideas,” Diamandis says.
Devising a prize, it turns out, can be as hard as winning one. “It has to be difficult but achievable, and it has to be something where having that prize is going to make a difference,” Musk says. “If you can’t figure out the right rules for the prize, if you can’t get a sponsor for the prize, if you’re not sure you can motivate people to get it done, then it’s not a good candidate.”
Diamandis is undaunted. With $7 million in hand from yet another partner, British Telecommunications Group, he is taking his message global. “We’re going to experiment in these social areas, and we’ll find out what is possible,” he says. “I think we need to be able to fail in prizes. It’s the only way to know if they’ll work.”
