For the most part humans are inherently driven to innovate, to reach for the stars. We’re driven by Manifest Destiny to explore new places, constantly pushing the envelope wherever we go. It’s who we are. It’s what we do. There was no financial incentive to discover fire or invent the wheel. Man didn’t go to the Moon to get rich. Most inventors, designers, garage tinkerers, craftsmen, and hobbyists do what they do not for the pursuit of riches, but rather for the richness that innovating fills their hearts with.
But every now and again we do need a quick kick in the butt, a financial incentive to get us over the hump, to get us motivated to solve, large intractable problems that have created a roadblock in our pursuit of progress. That’s where incentive prizes come in. These large-scale bonuses call attention to pressing issues and serve as a call to arms, drawing our best and brightest minds away from whatever else they were doing to focus on solving this new problem in the name of pride and prize.
The idea of financial competitions for generating ideas isn’t new. In fact, the practice dates all the way back to England in 1714 and the creation of the Longitude Prize. As the official Longitude Prize website explains:
“In 1714, the British Government offered, by Act of Parliament, £20,000 for a solution which could find longitude to within half a degree (equivalent to 2 minutes of time), and a group later known as the Board of Longitude was set up to assess submissions and offer rewards. These experts included the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich and other scientific, maritime and political leaders.”
It took a while but eventually a solution was found and mankind was off to the races with incentive competitions continuing to pop up throughout history. Flash forward three hundred years and things are really in full swing. An entire cottage industry has even sprung up around the practice with an entire website, InnoCentive, dedicated to them. But the ones that usually get the biggest buzz are the multi-million dollar challenges organized by entrepreneur turned author Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Singularity University and Executive Chairmen of the X-Prize.
To date there have been X-Prizes focused on sub-orbital flight, creating more efficient cars, oil cleanup, and many more. You’re probably familiar with the Lunar Lander prize. Others, not so much. Currently there are prizes based around AI, enhancing our understanding of ecosystems, turning carbon dioxide into products, and my personal favorite – a challenge to build a real life Avatar system.
Now comes news of the latest X-Prize challenge. An invitation to solve one of the most pressing design challenges of our current time: how to build a better mask. The prize hasn’t been announced yet. Just a survey to figure out why it is that people don’t like wearing masks. A fact finding mission to get the ball rolling.
But I can save them a lot of time. Masks are stifling and uncomfortable. They fog glasses. They seem to increase your body temperate, making you feel hotter than you really are, making you assume that you can’t breathe when you really can. They are boring and uncool. Others may have trouble hearing you speak and there’s no opportunity for facial expressions to be seen. They put deaf people at a severe disadvantage and there’s a belief that even if they protect you there’s a chance you could still wind up infecting yourself through the mere act of taking them off and putting them on.
The winning design would need to be sleek, sexy, transparent, and infused with tech. We already have the C-Mask that comes along with a universal speech translator. But since people seem to be most worried with how masks affect their ability to breathe I’m thinking that masks should also be tied to a smartphone app that displays your vitals thereby proving to you that everything is copacetic and whatever you think you’re feeling is really just in your head.
There are likely other solutions and that’s what the X-Prize mask competition hopes to find out. And I have no doubt that they will. Because when we are constrained, when our backs are against the wall, when all hope is lost…that is when some of our best ideas come out, forged in the fire of the creative process. As all of the other X-Prize competitions have proven, time and time again, sometimes all it takes is a little nudge, a little incentive.
Is an X-Prize for mask design the Greatest Idea Ever?
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