Fourth Street in downtown Santa Monica is an eclectic place—home to, among other concerns, the studio of “Dance Doctor” John Cassese, a chic trade-in clothing shop, and an emporium with the self-explanatory name Magicopolis. Amid such colorful neighbors, the X Prize Foundation presents a facade of anonymity, even, perhaps, of quiet mystery: a mirrored door that reads “Revolution Begins Here” with a stylized and rather cryptic X above, as if to mark the spot but do little else.
The entrance is at once easily overlooked and profoundly misleading. Behind the glass and up a flight of stairs, the X Prize organization is doing plenty. It made history in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to aircraft designer Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites for twice sending its SpaceShipOne more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) up into space, still the world’s only private manned spaceflights. Since then, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis has worked tirelessly to build a franchise for radical innovation that he says will change the world.
In September 2007 he stood with Google cofounder Larry Page in Los Angeles to unveil the Google Lunar X Prize, promising up to $25 million to the team that successfully lands an unmanned rover on the moon, drives it 500 meters, and sends back photos, video, and data. Two weeks later Diamandis was in New York, sharing the stage with former president Bill Clinton and committing to a dozen more competitions over seven years. Purses totaling $300 million would go to those who tackle “grand challenges” in categories such as global poverty, the environment, public health, and education. The first of these will take place in the fall of 2009, when Diamandis says up to 50 teams will compete for the Progressive Automotive X Prize by racing technologically advanced green cars—which must achieve the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon—in trials around the country. Nobody has yet mass-produced such cars.
Diamandis, though, is aiming for a still bigger breakthrough: a breakthrough in the way we achieve breakthroughs. Ever the evangelist, he spent one evening between the Google and Clinton announcements pitching his vision to a hundred or so Hollywood heavyweights gathered in the home of the socialite, pundit, and Web media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington. “What we try to do is really reach down into the souls of people and say, ‘You have the ability to solve the problems,’” Diamandis said, his voice rising. “It doesn’t take the government, it doesn’t take a large corporation. In fact, most brilliant solutions to problems come from the mind of an individual.
“We believe there’s a new model. It’s putting out a clear set of rules and a large cash challenge and saying, ‘We don’t care where you are, where you’re from, where you’ve gone to school, whatever you’ve done before—you solve this problem, you win.’”
