In 1919 Raymond Orteig, a wealthy French hotelier, offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York City and Paris. In 1927, underdog Charles Lindbergh won the prize in a modified single-engine Ryan aircraft called the Spirit of St. Louis. In total, nine teams spent $400,000 in pursuit of the $25,000 Orteig Prize. It is difficult today to fully appreciate the impact of Lindbergh’s flight but the following facts provide a small indication about how a single prize changed the way people thought about flight, and about the world itself:

• Increase in U.S. airline passengers from 5,782 to 173,405 in three years (1926-1929)
• 300% increase in applications for pilot’s licenses, 400% increase of licensed aircraft in the United States in one year (1927)
• The Spirit of St. Louis was personally viewed by a quarter of all Americans within one year of Lindbergh’s historic flight
• Today, the global aviation industry is estimated at more than $300 billion

Inspired by the Orteig Prize, the X PRIZE was announced in 1996 to stimulate Revolution through Competition by offering a $10 million prize to the first privately financed team that could build and fly a three-passenger vehicle 100 kilometers into space twice within two weeks. As it was later titled, the Ansari X PRIZE for Suborbital Spaceflight motivated 26 teams from seven nations to invest more than $100 million in pursuit of the $10 million purse. On October 4, 2004, the Ansari X PRIZE was awarded to Mojave Aerospace Ventures marking the beginning of the personal spaceflight revolution and signifying a radical breakthrough in prize philanthropy.

Revolution Through Competition
X PRIZES are large incentivized prizes that achieve three primary goals:
1) They attract mavericks from outside the sector that take new approaches and think creatively about difficult problems, resulting in truly innovative breakthroughs.
2) The breakthrough results are real and meaningful. Our competitions have measurable finish lines, and are designed to promote widespread adoption of the innovation. The awarding of a prize is oftentimes just the beginning of widespread political, economic, social and technological change.
3) Prizes create incredible amounts of leverage. They reach across national and disciplinary boundaries and compel global audiences to invest the intellectual and financial capital required to solve the seemingly intractable challenges of our time.

With the Ansari X PRIZE, the X PRIZE Foundation established a philanthropic model in which offering a prize for achieving a specific goal can stimulate entrepreneurial investment that produces a 10 times or greater return on the prize purse and at least 100 times in follow-on investment and social benefit.

The X PRIZE Foundation is expanding its scope so its extraordinary leverage can be applied to a range of global challenges where inducement prizes can work to improve lives, create equity of opportunity and stimulate new, important discoveries. The X PRIZE Foundation is examining new prizes in education, international development, life sciences, energy, the environment, and exploration—sectors where bureaucratic, intellectual, or structural roadblocks constrain and stifle investment and breakthrough innovation.

A New Model of Philanthropy
While there are thousands of prizes awarded annually, most are retrospective in nature. Similar in design to the Nobel Prize, most acknowledge achievements in a certain field, but do not specify ahead of time what the achievement will be. While retrospective prizes “push” people to solve challenges, X PRIZEs “pull” non-traditional innovators and entrepreneurs out of the woodwork and provide them with a raison d'être.

The X PRIZE Foundation is not a traditional grant-making organization so it does not impose budgets, reporting requirements or overhead. We free entrepreneurs from the very constraints they find most limiting and encourage them to invest every intellectual and financial resource at their command to solve the problem, reach the goal, and win the prize.

Only one team can win the Grand Prize. However, by encouraging a large number of groups to work in parallel, rather than a single entity, prizes ultimately allow society to reap the benefits of more minds working on a problem from many different angles. The concept of prize philanthropy is enormously powerful. The purpose of the X PRIZE is to aggressively apply our proven model of prize philanthropy in an expanded mission to create substantial breakthroughs over a wide range of endeavors for the benefit of humanity.

Select X PRIZE Foundation Supporters and Board of Trustees

Eric Anderson
President & CEO
Space Adventures

Dr. Anousheh Ansari
First Female Private Space Explorer
Co-Founder & Chairman
Prodea Systems, Inc.

Stewart Blusson, B.Sc., Ph.D.
Stewart & Marilyn Blusson Foundation

Peter H. Diamandis, M.D.
Chairman & CEO
X PRIZE Foundation

Gil & Elyssa Elbaz
Engineering Director
Google

Dean Kamen
Founder
DEKA Research & Development

Omid Kordestani
Senior VP, Global Sales & Business Development
Google

Ray Kurzweil
Founder
Kurzweil Technologies

Gregg E. Maryniak
Director & VP, Aerospace Sciences and Astronomy
James S. McDonnell Planetarium

Elon Musk
Chairman
Space Exploration Technologies

Larry Page
Co-Founder & President, Products, Google

Adeo G. Ressi
CEO
Game Trust

Jeffrey Shames
Executive in Residence
MIT Sloan School of Management

Barry Silverstein
Board of Directors
Franklin Street Properties & The World Resident Holdings, LTD.

John Templeton Foundation: Charles L. Harper, Jr., D.Phil.
Senior Vice President

Barry Thompson
Co-Founder & CTO
Tervela, Inc.

J. Craig Venter, Ph.D.
Founder & President
J. Craig Venter Institute

Robert K. Weiss
Motion picture & television producer and
Vice Chairman & Executive Producer,
X PRIZE Foundation