What Will the Next Multimillion Dollar X Prize Be?

"Breakthroughs come from nontraditional places," X Prize Foundation chairman and chief executive Peter Diamandis said, a way of explaining why Rainn Wilson of NBC's The Office was sitting in a room with Microsoft's Paul Allen.

Allen and Wilson were among the 120 CEOs, scientists, philanthropists, and innovators who sat around a film studio in Los Angeles recently, brainstorming solutions to the world's most vexing problems. They weren't actually tasked with developing any solutions themselves; the weekend brainstorm was intended to hatch ideas for the next X Prize. "People who are experts in an area are often blinded to ?orthogonal thinking," Diamandis said. "An expert is someone who can tell you exactly how something can't be done. A real breakthrough sometimes comes from a na?ve question, or someone outside the field that looks at things differently."

X Prizes have challenged inventors to come up with oil-skimming robots, hyper-efficient cars, and moon robots, among other things. The attendees at this event were presented with a broad range of topics?oceans, energy generation, jobs, robotics, education, energy storage, transportation, poverty, natural disasters, poverty, food security, neuromedicine, and bioterrorism, which had been requested by the U.S. government?and then asked to ponder: Where do we need a breakthrough?

Go. Ideas were cast back and forth. At the energy-generation brainstorm, a Washington consultant stood up. "The problem is not that there isn't enough capital to finance breakthrough technologies, it's that the policy signals are so blurry and unpredictable, that the capital cannot be unlocked to scale these technologies." Someone else suggested a prize to build the first carbon-free city. "The problem is power transmission and line loss," another said. A VP at Nintendo, who happens to be Icelandic, proposed devising a low-cost way to harness geothermal energy along the Ring of Fire. Another attendee: "There is zero money going into alternative physics R&D because of the stigma. Physics says its possible but we're not working on it at all!"

Denim-clad entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen interjected then:"We are so Western-centric. Think about this: There are 7 billion people out there now. We all know that about half of them live on less than two bucks a day. Half of that two bucks is spent on some form of energy. If over the next 20 years, the developing world has the ?outrageous' goal of becoming unbelievably prosperous and it goes up to $3 a day, everything you're talking about in North America is irrelevant. You're swatting at the flies while you're getting trampled by the elephant."

A man raised his hand. "I'm going to throw out a wild idea. Most of the world walks. Walking is a form of energy. Can't someone invent a way for the heat to be stored for reuse?"

Unfortunately, no, Kamen said. "Walking on a hard surface is the most efficient form of human transportation. It takes about 22 watts to move at walking speed. If you do anything to take out a little of that, you'd feel like you're walking in mud and you wouldn't do it?it would add inefficiency."

Kamen had more. "There's one more data point you all should consider. We can all talk about how expensive energy is?nominally, make it 10 cents a kilowatt hour. A really good athlete?[say in] crew, where you can use all your muscle groups simultaneously?can put out a few hundred watts for a few minutes before they go anaerobic. It would take 20 of those people to cycle through machines to produce 1,000 watts an hour. So, 20 Herculean athletes, working in beautiful synchronicity?for an hour?make 10 cents of electricity. It's a nonsense argument."

Everyone laughed. Diamandis said, "I love having you around, Dean."

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