Challenge prizes offer unique opportunities for materials innovation
- PDF / 278,808 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 13 Downloads / 167 Views
Challenge prizes offer unique opportunities for materials innovation By Kendra Redmond
P
rizes that recognize groundbreaking discoveries and technological advancements are common in the scientific community; prizes that incentivize such work with millions of dollars are much less familiar in the physical sciences. A growing number of competitions have emerged over the past decade that offer a large cash prize to the person or team that can meet a challenge most efficiently or quickly. Many of these challenges are based on important global issues that have key materials components, and they provide intriguing opportunities for researchers to innovate and collaborate.
Called inducement prizes or challenge prizes, these competitions outline a desired outcome and, in most cases, offer participants zero funding and few guidelines on how to get there. Unlike most research grants, prizes are open to individuals, academic groups, industry teams, and mixed collaborations. This can lead to more novel approaches to solving problems, according to Tamar Ghosh, lead for the Longitude Prize at Nesta, the United Kingdom’s innovation foundation. The Longitude Prize is a £10 million competition for a diagnostic test that can better inform doctors when and what kind
The team members of Eigen Lifescience, led by Shan Wang, won a distinguished award in the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE for developing a blood test that uses the microprocessor of a smartphone to rapidly diagnose hepatitis B. Front row (left to right): Jung-Rok Lee, Adi Wijaya Gani, Shan Wang, Paul (P.J.) Utz; back row (left to right): Joohong Choi and Daniel Bechstein. Credit: XPRIZE.
of antibiotics to prescribe for a bacterial infection, in response to the growing incidence of antibiotic resistance. Challenge prizes aim to drive solutions, often in the space that comes after basic research and between early technological advancement and commercialization. They are most effective for well-defined goals that require a technological leap whose details are uncertain. One such example is the USD$2.25 million US Department of Energy’s Wave Energy Prize competition, encouraging game-changing developments in ocean wave energy converter devices that extract energy from waves and convert it to electricity. “Wave energy became a strong candidate for a public prize challenge due to the need for a technology leap in this sector,” says Alison LaBonte, a program manager in the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Wind and Water Power Technologies Office. “We have already seen significant technical achievements in the 12 months since the prize was announced.” Other examples include the European Commission’s (EC) 1.5 million Horizon Prize seeking new technologies for retrofitting diesel engines and powertrains to reduce emissions, the USD$10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE for a lightweight device that can capture vital signs and diagnose diseases, and Sir Richard Branson’s USD$25 million Virgin Earth Challenge for activities that remove greenhouse gases from the air. According to a spokes
Data Loading...
