The Great Innovation Challenge: How challenge prizes can kick-start the British economy
Beyond the innovations they help unleash, and the innovators they support, prizes also bring about broader, more systemic change. This can be industry or sector building and awareness raising, through the high profile of the prize; developing innovation alongside regulation or policy; or building momentum around investment and new funding. Prizes can help identify best practice, shift regulation and drive policy change. The public demonstration of technologies that occurs in prizes is a key contributor to this. A thread running through almost all of this is the role challenge prizes can play in legitimising an issue: the signal sent by a funder that the problem is important, that working on it is a serious endeavour and that the future can be different. Looking in more detail at some of these high-profile and large-scale US prizes can illustrate the diverse ways in which these unique characteristics manifest themselves.
The Ansari X Prize Creating breakthrough innovations The Ansari X Prize was created in 1996 to demonstrate that privately-financed space flight was viable, and had commercial potential. Teams competing for what became a $10 million prize would have to launch and return a reusable manned spacecraft 100km into space twice within two weeks. 26 teams from seven countries built rockets in attempts to win the prize, each funded entirely by the team. The prize was won from a launch site in the California desert in October 2004, on the anniversary of the Sputnik launch. The Mojave Aerospace Ventures team was led by aerospace designer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites. It was financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. On its first flight, their SpaceShipOne left the carrier plane and rolled 30 times on the way to its target height, but it made it over 100km and was judged successful.27 The next week, thanks to some engineering tweaks to stop the rolling, pilot Brian Binnie reached 112km. He returned to earth with a new world record for the height reached by an aviation vehicle and $10 million for his team. Helping innovators thrive Brian Binnie’s experience on the edge of space was lauded as the beginning of space tourism. X Prize Foundation chairman and founder Peter Diamandis said that President Bush phoned the winning team to offer his congratulations: ‘He said that it was great to see the spirit of enterprise alive in America and opening up the space frontier.’28 Diamandis was clear from the beginning that the aim of the prize was to show that it is no longer just governments that could go to space.
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