ESRI Code Challenge

Get In On the Code Challenges - $16,000 in Cash Prizes Up for Grabs - ESRI Developer Summit Blog -

Participating developers will have the opportunity to review and vote for the top two entries in each challenge based on creativity, applicability, and relevance of each code sample. Entries must be a mobile GIS application developed using the ArcGIS Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) or a Web mashup built with ArcGIS Server SDKs.

See the official rules and guidelines for the ArcGIS Server Mashup Challenge.
See the official rules and guidelines for the ArcGIS Mobile Challenge.

GIS mapping software often uses satellite imagery and GPS data.

Salvage/Deorbit Prize Suggestion

Space law and satellite collisions; A space salvage challenge - RLV News -

I think a space prize program for salvage or deobiting might be feasible. For example, the first organization to deorbit successfully a spacecraft from a given set of derelicts, whose owners have agreed to the operation, would win a substantial purse. I'm thinking of a small vehicle, most likely with electric propulsion, that would rendezvous with a derelict and place, say, a deorbit tether on it to increase its drag substantially. Perhaps instead of deorbiting, they would "tug" the derelict to a specific parking orbit.

Future X PRIZEs

A few weeks ago I posted about a podcast from last Fall where the X PRIZE Foundation's Tom Vander Ark discussed, among other things, some possible future X PRIZEs.

Cosmic Log has an article that covers the various prizes of the X PRIZE Foundation, including recent comments by Peter Diamandis about where the Foundation is now with those future prizes, and how they are logically organized. The deep sea exploration prize I first heard of in Tom's interview is mentioned again here, which is encouraging. The article also mentions a longevity prize. I wonder if they're talking with the Methuselah Foundation? Woodrow Wilson Smith would be proud.

Aero-News has a review of Peter Diamandis's career, including the various prizes (that he helped organize, and that he won) and space businesses. There's a brief comment here about plans for future X PRIZEs, too. This article is in the context of a speech at the Women in Aviation International Conference.

Since we're on the topic of possible future X PRIZEs, here are more details from an earlier Space Prizes post on one possible future X PRIZE (and maybe part of a line of related prizes).

Asteroid Prize Proposal

Mark Whittington has a proposal for an asteroid prize. The prize suggestion is on page 3 of the article.

One problem with the current implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration, NASA's ESAS architecture, is that it doesn't plan to return exploration results until 2020. That's a long time for taxpayers and politicians to wait. If a human asteroid mission done with, if we must, the traditional contracting approach can be done before a comparable lunar mission, it's tempting to hope for that route, followed by either Mars or lunar missions. However, I suspect that an asteroid mission using that approach would also involve a huge time gap between the decision to do it and any actual results.

However, the proposal that was publicized before the Stanford meeting Mark describes actually didn't suggest an asteroid as the next step. It suggested adding the capability to an Ares I/Orion baseline, using commercial assistance like a Bigelow module, to do Lagrange point satellite servicing missions to maintain multiple assets like the James Webb Space Telescope. This sounds like it could be achieved much sooner, in which case it would be a quite interesting stepping stone whether the next step is an asteroid or the Moon. It wouldn't solve all of the current problems with ESAS, but it could be an improvement over current plans. Perhaps it would keep Ares 1 productively busy before Ares V is built, allowing commercial vendors to supply the ISS without political resistance from Ares 1 operational supporters.

Entrepreneur Alert: Cisco I-Prize

Calling all space entrepreneurs ... Cisco recently started a contest called the Cisco I-Prize. Here's the prize that could be on the line:

The winning team may have the opportunity to be hired by Cisco to found a new business unit and share a $250,000 signing bonus. Cisco may invest approximately $10 million over three years to staff, develop, and go to market with a new business based on your idea.

However, it's not easy to win. Phase I "Brainstorming" is almost over already (but it only started a couple months ago, so if you already have well-formulated ideas you've been pitching, you may be ok). You've got to convince them that you have a business plan that's worth their while investing in. Space businesses may be a tough sell ... but space entrepreneurs may have an advantage this time because they've done so much in the "prize" environment. If you have a "dual use" space concept that can work in space but can also work in terrestrial applications, all the better. Here's what they're looking for:

Ideas should have the potential to bring in at least $1 billion revenue to Cisco over a five- to seven-year period, and submissions must use the IP network as a platform.

Ground station infrastructure? In-space communications using IP and linking to ground networks? Some computer application using space data (imagery, GPS, etc.) like Google Earth? I sure don't know, but I think some space businesses could fit the model.

Check out the Cisco I-Prize blog. So far they've seen a lot of ideas in energy, healthcare, automotive (sounds like those non-space X PRIZEs!) and wireless. However, they're not unfamiliar with commercial space.

The California Space Authority has an article about Cisco and space:

- Cisco Increasingly Looks to Military Space Projects: Here's an excerpt:

Sanford said that by putting a so-called Internet protocol router in space, essentially a modified version of commercial technology used on the ground, the project could serve as a sort of test bed for future, multibillion dollar Air Force investments in a fleet of advanced military-communications satellites. He said it's also a way to get the military "user community directly involved" in specific technical issues and planning for future satellite projects.

The Space Show has an interview with Cisco's Richard Sanford.

Here's a CSA pdf on a Cisco space IP press release.

More on Gingrich and a Mars prize

Space Politics has more on Newt Gingrich and space prizes. You can also see a copy of the interview discussed at Space Politics at Newt.org. Innovation prizes are discussed several times in the interview:

JB: ... You propose, in “Real Change,” a new kind of space program, for, giving prizes, for example, to go to Mars. How can the bureaucracy permit you to go past them and accomplish something like this?

NG: I think the bureaucracy will probably do everything it can to stop it. In 1903, the Smithsonian had been working on airplanes for 10 years, and had spent over $50,000 in tax money, and the Wright brothers, who were two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, flew. Now, they actually had a fundamentally different model than the Smithsonian model. It was much lighter, it was much smaller, it had a different set of aerodynamic principles, and it worked. It’s only great virtue was that it actually flew. Now you would never have gotten it funded by the National Science Foundation, you never would have gotten it approved at the Smithsonian, because they didn’t believe in it intellectually. It’s not that they were bad people; but they were wedded to a bad idea.

NASA today has managed to make space dull, expensive, bureaucratic, and slow. This is an enormous achievement: it’s just a dumb one. I think what we want is to find ways to break out. What I propose is to go back to a model that worked in aviation for 50 years: Offer very large prizes. I had a very senior member of the Air Force say to me, if we had a $5 billion tax-free prize for the first team to get to Mars -- think of it as the 21st Century America’s Cup, ‘cause, you know, there are millionaires and billionaires out there who spend an amazing amount of money on yachts in order to compete for the America’s Cup.

If we had a 21st Century America’s Cup in space, this particular expert in the Air Force said to me, they thought we’d get there in about five years and save about $220 billion dollars in federal spending over the next generation. So, you look at that sort of thing, and I don’t want to try to fix NASA, I want to try to create a competitive, prize-based system. I want to do the same thing in health. Alzheimer’s, a terrible disease, is a $1 trillion, 200 billion [threat??] to the baby boomers. What if we had a substantial prize: a billion dollars or more, tax free, for the first breakthrough that blocks the effects of Alzheimer’s. If any bright scientist anywhere wanted to stay up late at night, just invent it. Don’t fill out forms, don’t send in 70 copies, don’t wait to be peer reviewed: if you can meet the standards, and you can meet the challenge, you can get the money.

JB: Somewhere in my desk at home I have a copy of the Wright brothers’ first contract with the United States Army for their flyer. I believe it’s three-and-a-half pages long. I don’t know that you can get there from here in our current system. How can you get Congress to understand the value of such prizes and change it? You’re talking about real change in your book, and you’re defining it in terms of real leadership. Explain please.

NG: Well, we have been first of all, talking with many members of the House and Senate, as well as Governors and state legislators, and I’m getting a pretty significant response. I think there will be bills introduced in the next two months on a whole series of prizes. And I think there’s real interest: for example, at least one presidential candidate has picked up the idea, $1 billion for the first mass produced car that can do 100 miles to the gallon, which begins to change the whole economy for gasoline and for oil in Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Iran. So I think you’re going to see the idea of prize dramatically reenter the public dialogue, and that’s one way I think “Real Change” is going to turn out to be a pioneering book that really does create a fundamental shift in the national dialogue. We found in our polling -- which is at AmericanSolutions.com -- if you click on ‘research’ there, we did six national polls this summer, and overwhelmingly we had people who think prizes are a good idea. We saw the X prize being offered several years ago, for near space: $200 million was invested, to get a $10 million dollar prize. Because you stimulate the competitive spirits, you encourage the entrepreneurial mindset, you say to people who have lots of money and strong egos, “Let’s see if you can do it.” Not, “let’s see if you can apply for the paperwork,” -- “let’s see if you can actually do it.”

...

NG: ... I would say that you could look at this whole issue of prizes. Overwhelmingly the American people are worried about their energy future. They feel very uncertain about having Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia. How can a rational country rely on those sources of energy? And so I think if there was an aggressive opportunity to say to every entrepreneur in the world, “Look. If you can get us out of this mess, you’re going to get very rich very fast,” I think you’d see dramatic change.

Here's some polling results from the site Newt mentions, AmericanSolutions.org:

PRIZES

Prizes should be given to companies and individuals that invent creative ways to solve problems.

We support giving large financial prizes to companies and individuals who invent an affordable car that gets 100 miles to the gallon. (77 to 15)
We support giving a large financial prize to the first company or individual who invents new ways to successfully cut pollution. (79 to 18)
We support giving a large financial prize to the first company or individual who invents a new, safer way to dispose of nuclear waste products. (79 to 16)

Also see pages 94-97 here.

Reenacting Glenn's Flight?

Personal Spaceflight has a post on an idea to redo John Glenn's original spaceflight in modern times. One of the commenters has an idea for a different way to remember that flight:

A far better honor would be to use the money as a prize for placing a private astronaut in orbit. $45 million would get folks interesed. Call it the Glenn Prize in honor of the flight.

I wonder what John Glenn himself thinks about the idea?

Another Year in Review Emphasizes Prizes

New Scientist gives us another of those "year in review" articles. This one is on spaceflight. As with similar articles I've mentioned, it gives space prizes a lot of weight considering the relatively low funding for the prizes. The article also emphasizes NewSpace events and robotic science spacecraft far more than NASA's Ares I/Orion plans (which interestingly are covered mainly under section "NASA woes"). I think that reflects on the level of interest in, and expectation of results from, the public has in the prizes, NewSpace activities, and robotic science missions compared to ESAS.

Since the ESAS rockets don't attempt to lower launch costs, don't encourage much commercial (not contractor) activity, and don't even help the non-NASA space field by using EELVs, they should at least have strong public support and (non-scandal-related) interest. Yet if "year in review" articles like this one are any indication, it seems the professional judgement of the media is the public isn't tremendously interested in ESAS. That leads to the question "Why isn't the public interested in ESAS?", followed by "How can ESAS be changed so the public is interested in it?". I suspect the answer has nothing to do with communication strategies, but rather is all about changing ESAS so it has some of the characteristics of the activities (space prizes, COTS, NewSpace, robot science probes) the public apparently is interested in.

Prizes Prominent in Year in Review

CNet is writing a number of "2007 Year in Review" articles covering various categories (Web 2.0, etc). One of the categories is Science, and just about everything in the yearly science review covered either space, or robotics, or both. Not only that, but space prizes and robotic prizes (or both at the same time) are featured heavily. To be honest, even I wouldn't have featured space or prizes so prominently in a category that covers science in general, unless I were giving space and prizes a bit of a boost because they're so fun to read about.

If you check the links to the right of the article, you'll see a lot more prize-related headlines from 2007.

Mars Sample Return Mission Design Contest

Here's a page on the Mars Drive Mars Sample Return Mission Design Contest. This is late; I hadn't heard of the contest until now. Entries were due in February, but I'm not sure what the status is on judging the entries ... is the jugding still in progress, did someone win, or is the contest going to continue into 2008? I don't know, but I thought I should present the link anyway.

The cash value part of the prize at stake is modest in comparison with the Planetary Society Apophis Mission Design Competition for asteriod tagging, but there are other rewards, too:

Contest Prizes

1st Prize -

All expense-paid trip to present at the ISDC 2008 Conference
$500 Cash purse
Showcased on all MarsDrive partners sites
Submission to the AIAA
Recognition at the annual Mars Society International Conference

2nd Prize -

$100 Cash purse
Showcased on all MarsDrive partners sites

You can see a number of entries to the contest here.

Here's some insight into the contest judging:

Mission Selection Designs will be selected from submissions by a panel of leading experts in various areas of expertise including:

Astrobiology: Dr. Christopher P. McKay, Planetary Scientist with the Space Science Division of NASA Ames.
ISRU: Dr Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society
Science/Engineering: Louis Friedman, President of the Planetary Society

Filling in the Prize Middle Ground

Here's another post from the same site I referenced in the previous post. This one advocates a middle ground between big prizes like the X PRIZEs and Centennial Challenges and the smaller ones like some of the student competitions. In the aerospace world even the well-off university and large private teams are tiny in comparision with government projects, so in a sense these "big" ones are really "small", but I see what he means and I do agree that there's a "middle ground" in the prize world that could be filled.

Of course, the "Google Android" software challenge I posted about yesterday could be a "middle ground" prize that a lot of small but very serious and hard working teams could win ...

New York Times on Innovation Prizes

The New York Times recently had an article on innovation prizes, including the ones managed by the X PRIZE Foundation (past, present, and many in the future, if current plans hold), as well as others managed by Innocentive, google.org, and others.

The article contains a couple of critiques of innovation prizes. Here's one:

But its approach has raised questions in the nonprofit and foundation worlds.

These prizes tend to attract those people who have resources to begin with,” said Mr. Burns, the consultant, referring to space exploration contests and the like. “It doesn’t serve everyone, nor does it solve social ills. I’m not as excited about these prizes that seem to be nothing more than the pursuit of awards for capitalist happiness."

Give me a break.

If the prizes tend to attract people who have resources to begin with, so what? Maybe they'd be using those resources to buy a boat or something else a non-profit consultant would find particularly unattractive for someone else to have. Anyway, smart competitors without a lot of money have been finding a way to win innovation prizes - by going the cheap innovation route, or by getting sponsors, or by forming teams.

As far as "serving everyone and solving social ills", some innovation prizes actually for all practical purposes do one or both of these (and we may very well find, looking back 20 years from now, that the ones that did this the most dramatically were not the ones a socially-minded consultant would have expected to). Some don't, but so what? Does, or should, every traditional non-profit initiative serve everyone and solve social ills? No. Do the ones that try do it effectively? Not always, by a long stretch.

Does it matter if a non-profit consultant is "as excited" by innovation prizes, as long as the prize sponsors, teams, their sponsors, and the public are? I don't think so.

Is there something wrong with "the pursuit of awards for capitalist happiness"? I can't think of anything wrong with it. In fact it strikes me as being a positive spirit to inject into non-profit work. I'll also bet that it's a lot more useful, productive, efficient, and fun than a lot of other approaches.

Innovation prizes definitely have their limits. They aren't useful for solving a lot of problems, and even when they are, it's easy enough to design or manage them poorly. There are many cases where, even though an innovation prize would be successful and useful, other approaches would be even better. However, innovation prizes do have a lot of uses, potentially in a lot more applications than they appear in now. Let's face up to the real opportunities and limitations of innovation prizes, and not make up reasons to shy away from them.

A Big Prize List; Kavli Prizes

Site Big Fat Prize (apparently in beta test) keeps, well, a big fat list of prizes, including prize value, links, and short prize descriptions. A lot of the prizes covered are the ones typically covered here - space prizes and technology innovation prizes. There are plenty of others.

I see a lot of business plan competitions, for example (including space business plans like Lunar Ventures or the Space Frontier Foundation's Business Plan Competition).

There are categories for space and science prizes, but those are empty. Since the link I gave at the beginning of the post has plenty of space prizes, I imagine they'll fill in these categories at some point. They do have a lot in the lists for invention and technology, and they even have a separate section for The X PRIZE Foundation's prizes.

I don't know exactly where they're going with the site, but it has potential. I hope they can fill in the missing spots, get the blog going, and add some more database lookup capabilities (for example, searches based on not just prize category but amounts, past and future events like prize registration timeframes, and other useful criteria). I have all sorts of other ideas that might work for the site ... who knows how much work it would be to implement, though.

One prize they list that I should mention is the Kavli Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize in that it looks back at past achievements rather than giving an incentive for a future achievement. It includes three $1,000,000 prizes every 2 years (starting in 2008). The fields are Astrophysics, Nanoscience, and Neuroscience. The way they bring together those 3 diverse fields is "The prizes focus on the science of the greatest physical dimensions of space and time, the science of the smallest dimensions of systems of atoms and molecules, and the science of the most complex systems, especially living organisms." It sounds pretty symmetric now!

I'll give the Astrophysics prize a bit of special attention by adding their description of its scope:

The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics will be awarded for outstanding achievement in advancing our knowledge and understanding of the origin, evolution, and properties of the universe, including the fields of cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy, planetary science, solar physics, space science, astrobiology, astronomical and astrophysical instrumentation, and particle astrophysics.

Bigelow Offers Incentives for Crew Launch

New Scientist reports that Bigelow Aerospace plans a $760M contract for 8 crew launches that meet specific criteria. They need crew launch capability to support the inflatable space stations they plan. Bigelow already offers an incentive for development of crew launch: $50M for America's Space Prize. However, it doesn't look like anyone is about to win that prize, which has some very high hurdles - no government funding (use of government test and launch sites is allowed), significant reusability, significant crew size, and so on - and needs to be won in January 10, 2010.

What isn't clear (at least to me) is what will happen with America's Space Prize when this contract is issued. Will America's Space Prize be extended, or modified in some way, but still be present as an additional incentive (to the contract winner or other competitors)? Will the $760M contract have similar rules to the prize, or will launchers like SpaceX's Falcon 9 or EELVs, which get government funding, be allowed? Will government funding be allowed, as long as there is no government ownership of the company? Will it be a U.S. contract (America's Space Prize requires that the contestant live and work in the U.S.)? Will reusability be a requirement? It would be interesting to see the prize continue (perhaps in modified form), since even if the $760M contract works, Bigelow should want a backup!

There's more on this in posts and comments at Transterrestrial Musings, Personal Spaceflight, and RLV News.

2007 Feynman Prizes

Responsible Nanotechnology reports on the 2007 Feynman Prizes in nanotechnology.

Antelope Valley Press on Rocketeers

In The sky's not the limit: High-flying citizens fund space travel, the Antelope Valley Press writes on the book Rocketeers and its coverage of the X PRIZE and Mojave companies.

Space Review on the V-Prize

Today's Space Review has an article on the V-Prize written by Paul de Brem. This prize is in the concept and development stage. The organizers of the prize would like to create a $10-25M prize, similar to the Ansari X PRIZE, for a 1-hour flight from Virginia to Europe.

If you can read French, you should be able to find references to a recently-published article by the same author in "Le Journal du dimanche".

It sounds like a tough prize to organize (even the X PRIZE Foundation hasn't come out with a follow-on to the X PRIZE, and that's a lot of money to raise!), but they'll need a big incentive because it's a tough prize to win, too. Best of luck to them.

Here's an earlier post I had on this prize.

Update: Spaceports, run by V-PRIZE's Jack Kennedy, has some comments.

SpaceChannel.TV and Prizes

I thought I'd post a link to SpaceChannel.tv. They post a lot of news updates, and divide them into categories similar to the tags used here and on many other blogs. The tag I used in the link above is "Prizes", so you should expect to see a number of articles on space prizes. Currently the link brings up few articles on related topics; for example, like me, they include the X PRIZE Foundation's Automotive X PRIZE, even though noone is going to get into space with those vehicles. I'm not sure how their article on alleged astronaut drinking got into this category, though ...

Education for NASA's VSE

The July 9 issue of Space News has an editorial entitled "A World-Class Work Force for Exploring Other Worlds" by David Black (former president of the University Space Research Association) and Dan Hastings (undergraduate dean at MIT). This editorial gives a summary of the conclusions of the National Research Council's report "Building a Better Workforce: Meeting the Future Workforce Needs for the National Vision for Space Exploration".

One of the major conclusions of the report is that NASA needs to look out for itself and ensure that it has the workforce skills in engineering, project management, and systems engineering that it will need for the VSE. The available pool of talent is there, but the program is multi-decade so NASA needs to help at all educational levels. Furthermore, these disciplines require significant amounts of hands-on experience (and opportunities to make, and to learn from, mistakes) at progressively more challenging assignments, not just classroom lectures. As a result, the authors of the report emphasize the need for more small missions, such as suborbital missions, smallsats, Explorer missions, and high altitude balloon and aircraft missions to develop talent and experience at all educational levels. Unfortunately, these opportunities have been shrinking rather than increasing to meet the VSE needs.

The editorial doesn't, but the much more detailed report does, mention the opportunities that could become available in real-world but educational missions with NewSpace businesses, many of which were inspired by prizes like the X PRIZE and Lunar Lander Challenge:

"NASA can also accomplish multiple goals by providing support to the emerging sector of new, small rocket companies often referred to as the “entrepreneurial space” or “alt-space” (or “new space”) community. Although these companies often cannot compete with traditional aerospace companies in terms of entry-level salaries, they can promise new employees opportunities for innovation, responsibility, and a high degree of engagement. They can also offer superb value to NASA in some cases. For example, it has been reported that the SpaceShipOne suborbital manned spacecraft program" ... "accomplished by a company of ~100 employees, spent significantly less than the hundreds of millions of dollars estimated by standard cost models for the project if conducted by NASA or the traditional aerospace sector. By furthering its support of such entrepreneurial companies, NASA can simultaneously achieve value, increase the diversity of the marketplace, and encourage the education and training of entry-level employees."

The report and article both emphasize the educational potential of prizes. From the report:

"NASA also can emulate an inexpensive and effective method used successfully by the Department of Defense. The “Grand Challenge” prize, a $2 million cash prize offered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), targeted university and amateur teams capable of developing autonomous vehicles." ... "The competition attracted entries from many of the country’s leading universities, most of which partnered with leading industrial companies that provided cash to and mentored the competing students. In the end, DARPA’s Grand Challenges program produced four winning teams and more than $170 million in investment over 2 years of competition. NASA could use its own Centennial Challenges prize program to achieve similar results, both financial and educational, by increasing the emphasis on this program beyond its current $9.7 million budget.

Previous prizes, ranging from the privately funded Ansari X PRIZE to the Department of Defense’s Grand Challenges, have shown a consistent ability to motivate a wide variety of individuals, many of them entry-level, to explore new solutions to longstanding problems and to conduct entire missions on extremely low budgets."

From the article:

"Our committee noted that nontraditional approaches to the agency's missions, such as the Centennial Challenges program, which awards prizes for developing innovative space hardware, also play a role in attracting skilled members of the work force from other areas. A recent example of this is the Astronaut Glove Challenge in which an unemployed engineer, who had left the aerospace sector a decade ago for apparently better prospects in the computer field, produced an astronaut glove that is superior to those currently in use. This was a dedicated and innovative worker whom the aerospace sector had lost, but has now regained due to a new way of engaging the engineering community."

I will just add that the VSE began with a reasonable amount of support from the entrepreneurial space, education, science, and environment communities. They saw the potential of the VSE to help their areas of interest. However, as the ESAS implementation of the VSE was formed into another NASA "space transportation corporation", and funding has been reduced (and VSE plans cancelled) in areas of interest to these communities, support has dropped considerably. In my opinion NASA needs to take serious steps with real consequences that can be felt soon to regain (political and cooperative) support from space entrepreneurs, the science community, the environmental community, and, as this report emphasizes, the educational community.

Greater support for appropriate prizes in NASA's Centennial Challenges program is one relatively cheap way to accomplish all 4 objectives. General support (for example, buying services, funding enhancements such as environmental and other science instruments compatible with suborbital or small space vehicles and their flight profiles, funding small university missions on suborbital vehicles, funding small lunar robotic missions) for entrepreneurial space business is another cost-effective way to do this. In particular, these avenues offer a great opportunity for small, educational missions that can grow the undergraduate students, graduate students, and beginning NASA/aerospace business employees into the lead talent ready for the big VSE missions.

Philanthropic Prizes Back in Vogue

Here's another article brought to you by the X PRIZE Foundation news ticker.

The San Francisco Business Times reports on the growing number of prizes that are being kicked off for philanthropic purposes. Some of the prizes are of the "technology innovation incentive" variety that this blog usually emphasizes, while others address social, political, or educational issues. The article describes the reason why I emphasize the innovation prizes here:

"Prizes are a really good tool for sparking new ideas and new collaborations and getting new people involved in the mix," said Lucy Bernholz, president of Blueprint R&D and a philanthropy blogger. She cautions, however, that prizes may inspire change but are a poor mechanism for sustaining that change. Indeed, the most successful prizes, like the Goldman Prize, provide ongoing support for winners beyond a crowning ceremony."

A well-designed innovation prize will give competitors the incentive to try multiple approaches to get past a "technology hurdle" that is preventing a commercial or government market that can sustain itself once the hurdle is overcome. The trouble with some prizes, and this tends to be true more often with non-innovation prizes, is that even after the prize is won, the advance that won the prize needs ongoing maintenance to thrive. Of course this is not always the case, and at any rate sometimes the goal is important enough to make the ongoing cost worthwhile.

Other than the X PRIZE, the prizes mentioned in the article are:

The Purpose Prize, which "provides five awards of $100,000 and ten awards of $10,000 to people over 60 who are taking on society’s biggest challenges".

The Goldman Environmental Prize, which is "the world's largest prize honoring grassroots environmentalists. Founded in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman, the Goldman Environmental Prize annually awards US$125,000 to environmental heroes from each of the world's six inhabited continental regions".

Ruckus Nation, which "is awarding up to $300,000 in cash and prizes to individuals and teams that join Ruckus Nation and submit the best ideas for new products to increase physical activity among kids".