forever. This is precisely the kind of watershed moment the X PRIZE Foundation wants to create.
The first X PRIZE was the Ansari Prize for suborbital spaceflight, which challenged teams to build private spaceships and thus open the space frontier to civilians. The winner was aviation designer Burt Rutan, financed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who won in 2004 with the acclaimed SpaceShipOne. Rutan took the $10 million prize purse, but, more importantly – at least in light of the foundation’s overall mission – more than $100 million was invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize. Quickly following were medical prizes for the develop- ment of proactive, affordable healthcare; automotive prizes for energy-efficient cars; and the lunar prize, which challenged teams to build, launch, land, and operate a rover on the lunar surface. Currently, the foundation – with such partners as Google, Qualcomm, Deloitte, and many others – offers prizes in the fields of energy, education, environment, technology, health, and so many others it’s impossible to list them all. But take a look at the broad spectrum of competitions and you’ll see for yourself how healthy competition is moving the world forward. Along with a distinguished group of directors and trustees, at the hub of all this innovation is founder and chairman Dr. Peter Dimandis, who has a resume that makes Leonardo da Vinci look like a slacker. Dimandis holds a graduate degree from MIT in aero- space engineering and an MD from Harvard Medical School. As a major player in the development of the per- sonal spaceflight industry, he created many space-related businesses, including the Zero Gravity Corporation, which offers parabolic weightless flights to the general public. Dimandis, in fact, seems determined to bring space travel “down to earth,” sponsoring education programs for promising high school and college students and promot- ing space tourism programs to allow private citizens to travel into the final frontier. In an exclusive interview with Selling Power, Dr. Diman- dis talked about the X PRIZE Foundation and competition. And the thing that struck us in this conversation was the amount of time and plain old pounding the pavement and selling Dr. Dimandis did to get his idea off the ground. Today, it’s a global phenomenon that everyone takes for granted – with enough sponsors for a huge variety of proj- ects. And that’s what selling’s all about.
How did you come up with the idea of turning hu- manitarian and global projects into a competition? Did
your plan meet with resistance? I was inspired by reading Charles Lindbergh’s autobi- ography, The Spirit of St. Louis. The Orteig prize offered $25,000 for the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Lindbergh won this prize on May 21, 1927. Lindbergh
‘‘
There is a common spirit of competition across every industry and field, and it is that spirit that drives breakthroughs.
and the Orteig prize are credited with creating today’s $300 billion aviation industry and exciting the world about aviation. Following Lindbergh’s flight, the number of U.S. airline passengers increased from 6,000 to 180,000 in only one year. The X PRIZE Foundation is trying to apply this same prize model to achieve radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. I probably pitched to 200 CEOs and CMOs over six years, and, with every presentation, I convinced myself that this was a viable concept. It was just a matter of finding the right person. I never knew finding a visionary person would be so difficult, but my greatest attribute is my stubbornness! I thought that Sir Richard Branson was perfect for it, but even he wasn’t ready to take the risk in the early days. I got close with Fred Smith of FedEx and with a few of the large auto- motive brands. But, in the end, the Ansari family was perfect.
Originally, you looked for a corporate sponsor to fill in the “X” in the X PRIZES. In the long run, do you think
it’s better that you didn’t find one company to under- write the whole expense, or is that something you were still hoping to bring about?
When I named it the X PRIZE, initially “X” was a variable
to be replaced by the name of the person who gave me the money. It just took so darn long to raise the money that the “X” stuck around. But it actually fits really well: ex- treme and exceptional. Roman numeral X for $10 million.
What do you think motivates people – the prize
money, the prestige, the spirit of competition, or some combination of the three? I think it’s a combination of prestige, the spirit of compe- tition, and a desire to find a solution to one of the world’s grand challenges, rather than the prize money itself. It is not unusual for teams to spend 10-fold more than the size of the purse. For the Ansari X PRIZE, it is reported that Paul Allen spent approximately $26 million on the con- struction of SpaceShipOne that captured the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE.
The average America’s Cup competitors typically spend $50 million to $70 million to build their boats to win a race with no cash prize. Formula 1 race car teams spend more than $100 million each year on their cars. Also, historically,
SELLING POWER FEBRUARY 2016 | 27 © 2016 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32