It always amazes me what we can achieve when we try to make the impossible possible.
Shortly after finishing medical school at Harvard, I read about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize in Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography, Spirit of St. Louis.1 The competition launched in 1919 and challenged intrepid aviators to fly an airplane nonstop between New York and Paris, a feat that at the time seemed nearly impossible.
As history has continually taught us though, the human spirit has the courage to look adversity squarely in the eye. The prize was won in 1927 by Charles Lindbergh following his heroic 33.5-hour flight, and it significantly advanced aviation technology.
I was enormously inspired by this story and the power of incentive prizes—so much so that I launched the first XPRIZE in 1996. This brought the spirit of the Orteig Prize into the modern era, offering a $10 million purse to the first team able to build and fly a reusable spacecraft capable of carrying three adults to one hundred kilometers above the earth twice in two weeks.
Just like the Orteig prize, when the XPRIZE was announced, the idea of a private team building and flying human-carrying spaceships looked like an impossible feat. Eight years later, on October 4, 2004, the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE for spaceflight was won by Scaled Composites and their winning vehicle, Space-ShipOne, an event that would fuel a new age of commercial space travel.
While these were two different incentive prizes in two different eras, there was one clear pattern running through both: the right mixture of opportunity, potential, and a grit to succeed created a combination able to produce exponential innovation and results.
This mixture is formed of fundamentally human ingredients, which manifest in the incredible work I have seen across the many other XPRIZEs that followed: global literacy, medicine, artificial intelligence, ocean health and mapping, transportation, oil-spill cleanup, and beyond.
I believe communities are increasingly critical in scaling up this potential and fostering a new era of how we innovate. Our world is becoming more connected every day. In 2017 3.8 billion people were online, and by 2024—via ground-based 5G, atmospheric satellites, and thousands of orbiting satellites—we will connect all eight billion humans on Earth.2 The impact of a globally connected species is far more exciting because each of us now has a computer in our pockets that is millions of times cheaper, millions of times more powerful, and thousands of times smaller than the computers that got humanity to the Moon in 1969.3
This reality is producing conditions like never before for people across the globe to collaborate, share information, and build new things. Innovation is no longer just happening in labs. It is getting created on the Internet, at meetups, in STEM classes, and in communities around the world.
This combination of connectivity and technology is going to be the catalyst for our next generation of innovators to rise, bolstered by a global community that understands them and supports their growth, experimentation, and success. To harness this potential we need to understand communities: how they work and how to produce thriving environments that are productive and inclusive. This is complicated and has historically been something of a “black art” to master the right balance of people, process, and technology that constitutes a successful community.
Jono has been a global leader in community strategy for years. He has spent his entire career focused on understanding the countless nuances of how to build communities and integrate them into businesses. The book you are holding provides his blueprint and approach, one formed from his work across many businesses and sectors.
I hope you harness our inbuilt human potential to produce communities that can further innovate, inspire, and deliver your own exponential results. We don’t make a brighter future alone; we make it together.
Here’s to making the impossible possible.
Peter H. Diamandis, MD
Founder & Executive Chairman, XPRIZE Foundation
Executive Founder, Singularity University
December 2018