An X PRIZE is a $10 million+ award given to the first team to achieve a specific goal, set by the X PRIZE Foundation, which has the potential to benefit humanity. Rather than awarding money to honor past achievements or directly funding research, an X PRIZE incites innovation by tapping into our competitive and entrepreneurial spirits.

The X PRIZE Foundation began a revolution in private spaceflight with the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE. On October 4, 2004, the Mojave Aerospace Ventures team, led by famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, captured the Ansari X PRIZE. The world took notice of this great achievement and the winning SpaceShipOne is now hanging in the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum.

The Ansari X PRIZE was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize, offered in 1919 by wealthy hotelier Raymond Orteig, to the first pilot who could fly non-stop between New York and Paris. The prize was finally won in 1927 by an unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh won the hearts of a nation, and his world-changing achievement spawned a $300 billion aviation industry.

X PRIZE competitions capture the imagination of the public and speed radical breakthroughs that can ultimately change the way we see ourselves and how we live on this planet. The X PRIZE Foundation continues to unveil new X PRIZEs in Exploration (Space and Underwater), Life Sciences, Energy & Environment, Education and Global Development.

Why X PRIZEs Work

There are many types of competitions and awards around the world, but an X PRIZE is in a class by itself. What sets us apart from other non-profit organizations is our ability to frame a challenge and incentivize a solution in a way that our efforts and funds are multiplied exponentially by the teams who strive to compete and win the prize.

There are three primary benefits of well constructed prizes and media savvy global competitions: they are a high-leverage and efficient investment, a powerful innovation strategy, and an effective change strategy.

Leverage and Efficient Investment

Prizes are efficient. Sponsors pay the winners when and if the goal is accomplished. Prizes are performance-based investment.

Prizes are very high-leverage. Competitors spend 10 - 40 times the amount of the prize purse to achieve the goal.

Prize sponsors receive early benefits from launch, registration, and prize related activities and make the majority of their payments when and if there is a winner.

Powerful Innovation Strategy

Prizes result in unexpected and unconventional approaches to problems without a clear path to solution.

Prizes result in multiple entries and often have the potential of multiple winners resulting in a new generation of solutions.

Prizes drive increased risk-taking by mavericks competing to win. Increased risk taking speeds innovation and results in breakthroughs.

A prize attracts teams from around the world, across boundaries.

Effective Change Strategy

Prizes create hope and inspiration; the day a prize is launched the question changes from “Can it be done?” to “When will it happen?”

Highly visible prize launches and global competitions attract worldwide attention increasing the understanding of the problem and preparing markets for rapid innovation adoption.

Prizes create heroes symbolic of what’s possible.

Prizes can create or reshape an inefficient or blocked market more rapidly than market mechanisms.

Prizes result in rapid and widespread investment against a defined goal compared to the traditional philanthropic theories (i.e., research, pilot, demonstration, legislation, investment—a process that can take decades).

Prizes are low-bureaucracy and encourage non-traditional players to enter and bring non-traditional solutions.

Prizes force rapid policy change to accommodate competitions when an innovation is apparent (e.g., FAA regulations allowing suborbital trials due to the Ansari X PRIZE).