Prizes and Challenges
In 1861, with the Civil War starting to rage on sea as well as land, the Union found itself in very rough waters. Its strategists knew that its antiquated wooden boats were no match for the Confederacy’s more modern, sturdier ironclad ships.1 And they knew that, if they didn’t upgrade their own fleet, they were sunk. That’s why the Navy engaged in a procurement process, selecting three designs for further development, including one from John Ericsson. At the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862, Ericsson’s USS Monitor managed an important draw against the Confederate battleship Virginia, at least temporarily preserving the Union blockade of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Following that modest success, President Abraham Lincoln and the Navy expanded the ironclad fleet in early 1863. But with increasing use, the Navy discovered that the vessels had a key defect: the magnetism of the iron siding interfered with compass tracking, skewing navigation so significantly that even the most capable captains often steered the ships the wrong way.
Thankfully, President Lincoln had a new vehicle to help steer them back. Starting with Benjamin Franklin’s foundation of the American Philosophical Society (APS) in 1743, there had been many calls for, and attempts at, creating a national society of science, through which ready, willing, and able experts would pool their talents to tackle the nation’s most pressing and seemingly intractable problems.2 That effort gained some momentum in the 1850s, through the work of a group of influential, yet self-deprecating scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts (calling themselves the Scientific Lazzaroni after an Italian bakery). But it was the Civil War that made such collaborative exploration really imperative, since the military began to recognize the value of scientific advice in evaluating new inventions to aid the war effort. In 1863, as he was assessing the ironclad problem, President Lincoln signed into law a unanimous act of Congress to establish the nonprofit, independent National Academy of Sciences (NAS), for work on an assortment of challenges during the conflict at hand and—assuming the Union endured—the decades to come.3
Fifty scientists signed up for the cause, receiving no compensation. A subset of them got to work on the Navy’s ironclad assignment. The results were impressive enough that President Obama spoke of them in a 2013 speech marking the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences. “By the next year, they were inspecting the Union’s ironclads and installing an array of bar magnets around the compasses to correct their navigation,” Obama told the audience. “So right off the bat, you guys were really useful. In fact, it’s fair to say we might not be here had you not. Certainly I would not be here.”
That line drew laughter, but the story of the National Academy’s founding is fodder for a serious conversation about problem solving, specifically the need for the government to be open, flexible, imaginative, and even courageous. Consider the stakes for Lincoln: he was in the midst of a conflict that could have entirely wiped out a young country. Yet, after the traditional problem-solving process went awry—with a contractor developing flawed ironclads—he adjusted, turning such a critical endeavor over to a startup with no track record. Reckless? Not really. In that case, Lincoln and Congress had drawn upon our most underutilized resource, our diverse talent in the private sector, widening the net to include the perspectives that might otherwise have been unknown or ignored, since our government has relied upon the same narrow cast of contractors, often choosing those who best know how to curry favor in the Beltway. In the instance of the ironclads, Lincoln and Congress drew upon prestige and public service as the primary motivators for time-limited participation; too often since, our government has defaulted to an external dedicated employee base which, by its nature, means greater costs.
Simply, we haven’t truly learned enough of a lesson from history, so we keep repeating the counterproductive parts.
In so doing, our government has gotten bigger, more bloated, and not necessarily better. Its modern acquisition culture—accepting of exorbitant costs and lengthy delays, rarely considering novel alternatives, and leaving itself no way out—is best embodied by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and the Department of Defense’s ongoing, embarrassing attempts to get it in the air.4 In 1996, the Pentagon conceived the F-35 as a radar-evading jet that would represent the pearl of the American armed forces air fleet. It contracted defense powerhouse Lockheed Martin to build roughly 2,500 jets at a cost in the $50–$60 million range apiece, for a total of roughly $125–$150 billion. Initially, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the jets were supposed to be introduced in 2008, with a full rate of production by 2012.5 Trouble with software testing, development, and integration led to numerous delays, and the projected cost of the aircraft had more than doubled by 2013, with the GAO reporting that tests to “evaluate the combat effectiveness and suitability of the aircraft in an operationally realistic environment” would not commence until 2017 or be completed until 2019, 26 years after the original contract. The total cost of roughly $400 billion—including nearly $2 billion for fixing errors uncovered in testing—would make it the most expensive government project in U.S. history, even with Lockheed Martin scheduled to deliver about 300 fewer planes than originally promised.
This is where our procurement strategy has been taking us. Norm Augustine, an aerospace businessman and former undersecretary of the Army, saw it coming. In 1983, he quipped that, at the current exponential rate of aircraft inflation, the cost of a single combat plane would not only exceed the department’s entire budget by 2054, but would need to be shared by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Absurd, right? In 2010, The Economist checked the numbers for a progress report.6 This time, no jokes. “We are right on target,” Augustine said of his dire prediction. “Unfortunately nothing has changed.”
Contract spending and inflation pressures are modern realities, not just in the Department of Defense for its complex weapons systems but also in a broader set of agencies that require information systems integration and related organizational support to address everyday concerns such as affordable housing, small-business lending, and public safety measures. The Obama administration has prioritized reining in contract spending, after the Bush administration had intentionally increased it through its philosophy of outsourcing more day-to-day services to the private sector. In fiscal year 2010, the federal government achieved the first year-over-year reduction in contract spending since 1997, down from $550 billion to $535 billion, partly through canceling overdue information technology contracts at several agencies (including Homeland Security, Justice, and Treasury) and asking agencies to pool software resources. In the fiscal year 2012, contract spending was down to $516 billion.
Still, that was more than double what it was in fiscal year 2001. Such an enormous figure would typically provoke a spirited, even rancorous debate about government size and waste, regardless of whether the public or private sector was providing the work. It might even spark a discussion about scope: perhaps the government should get out of certain market areas on account of the related budgetary strain. Those are worthy conversations, but they shouldn’t be the only ones, especially in an era when new easier-to-adopt technologies enable the government to explore alternate avenues. If the emphasis in problem solving is on “how,” rather than simply “how big” or “how much,” we might have a chance to achieve quicker, better, and, in some cases, cheaper solutions. There will always be a place for traditional acquisition methods, through which a government identifies a need, translates it into a set of requirements, and then selects a vendor with the lowest, technically acceptable bid.
But we need to make room for others.
Where can we find them?
In our history. In a bookstore.
Often, brainstorming leads to a better way to solve big problems. On the odd occasion, browsing can.
While working in the Clinton administration, as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Technology and Economic Policy, Tom Kalil stumbled upon Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. The best-selling book chronicled the overlooked efforts of John Harrison, an obscure eighteenth-century clockmaker, in assisting the British government to address the most vexing nautical issue of that time: the inability to accurately determine longitude while at sea, with the solution eluding the most illustrious thinkers of the era, including Sir Isaac Newton.7
This limitation led to numerous lost or wrecked ships, and to many lost lives, even before the grounding of four of Rear-Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s ships off the Isles of Scilly in 1707, and killing roughly 2,000 sailors. That tragedy, however, provided the impetus for the Longitude Act of 1714 and its creation of the Board of Longitude, which included Newton, and which established rather substantial financial rewards for introducing methods that determined longitude within varying distances—the top prize of £20,000 was equivalent to nearly $3 million today. In opposition to the conventional thinking of scientists and engineers, Harrison, then just 21, invented a watchlike device known as the chronometer. The device was initially too expensive for widespread use, and the Board of Longitude never awarded the top prize to Harrison, though it did give smaller prizes to him and at least nine others for their minor discoveries to aid the cause. It also incrementally funded some of Harrison’s continuing efforts, as did Parliament, and his work on the device until his death in 1776 set the stage for costs to come down considerably in the nineteenth century and for the chronometer to become the preferred method for measuring longitude.
Learning of Harrison’s long-ago, somewhat slow-motion triumph energized Tom Kalil to start charting a new course in modern policy making.
“I call prizes an old idea whose time has come again,” Kalil said.
Kalil’s evangelism was based on the modern reality, best expressed by Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”8 It was also based on economic austerity, since incentive prizes are awarded only to successful solutions and on simplicity, with the competition process designed to stimulate rather than stifle ambition.
Kalil asked the National Academy of Engineering to organize a workshopping event in April 1999 that attracted the former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, to speak on the importance of challenges and prizes.9 It also attracted representatives of various government agencies, including one of its most innovative, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), founded by President Eisenhower in 1958 with a one-page memo in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. DARPA was made responsible for preventing future technology-based surprises in defense, as well as for developing surprises of America’s own. Over the decades, DARPA had drawn upon those they believed to be the best and brightest scientific and technical minds throughout the country. But the agency recognized that prizes may uncover untapped talent in often-unrelated areas. So DARPA worked with Kalil and the Congress to pass legislation to give it authority for prizes. Kalil left government for academia in 2001, but DARPA’s experimentation in this area would continue, as one of the government’s leading proponents of prize policy throughout the George W. Bush administration and beyond.
While advising the Chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley and chairing the Clinton Global Initiative, Kalil continued advocating for challenges and prizes through position papers and op-eds, declaring this as “an idea that people of both parties should rally behind,” due to its ability to leverage the prize purse and, after finding a winner, attract further investment in a field. Yet, for most of the Bush administration, the government’s use of prizes was modest, limited to DARPA, NASA, and the Department of Energy.
The private sector was another story. There, the prize movement was taking off, thanks largely due to Peter Diamandis. While growing up in New York, Diamandis had a fascination with space and flight, winning a rocket design competition at age 12. Even after earning his medical degree, he continued exploring space-related opportunities—from communications to transport—as an entrepreneur. In his 30s, a reading of Charles Lindbergh’s autobiographical The Spirit of St. Louis encouraged him to get his pilot’s license, while also introducing him to the role that “the extraordinary prize stuff” played in the role of the commercial aviation industry. That book related how Raymond Orteig, a New York hotel owner, issued a 1919 challenge to aviators to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Nine teams spent more than $400,000 in competition for Orteig’s $25,000 prize. Lindbergh, then a 25-year-old mail pilot, pulled off the transatlantic feat.
If Lindbergh had applied for a government grant, his proposal probably would not have survived the peer review process, given the skepticism about his undertaking. Instead, Lindbergh merely needed to convince himself that he could cover the costs and summon the guts. He explained his daring by wondering, rhetorically, “What kind of man would live where there is no danger?”
This frame of thinking appealed to Diamandis, himself a dreamer and doer who found inspiration for his endeavors not only in history —such as the Apollo missions—but from science fiction. “My mission and purpose in life was to explore a new frontier,” Diamandis said. “The Star Trek universe painted a picture of a world of abundance, powered by technology. It offered to us, in our visioneering, a model of what the future could be like.”
In 1996, Diamandis announced the first X PRIZE in St. Louis. He based it on the Orteig Prize, and made entrance exceedingly appealing, by securing a $10 million donation from entrepreneurs Amir and Anousheh Ansari. The award would go to the first private team that constructed a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, twice within two weeks. In response, 26 teams from seven countries, collectively spending more than $100 million in development work, with Scaled Composites, from Mojave, California, winning in 2004 for a vessel called SpaceShipOne (SS1).10 Better still, the entrants’ remarkable progress toward a proof of concept stimulated the imagination of countless others who hadn’t been part of the competition. That, as Kalil noted, served to launch something else: “The big win was not that someone got a prize, but that Richard Branson and others said, hey, space is not just for governments anymore. There can be a vibrant commercial space industry.” That industry has since exceeded $1.5 billion in public and private funding.
The government needed to more consistently achieve that sort of payback on innovation investment. That was a frontier Kalil sought to explore further, after joining the Obama administration in 2009 as the Deputy Director of the Office of Science and Technology. He and I worked on the President’s Strategy for American Innovation, which included a call for agencies to increase their use of prizes and challenges as a tool for stimulating innovation. By March 2010, the White House Office of Management and Budget would release instructions to agencies, encouraging them to use prizes and challenges, even if they had yet to receive explicit authority. And by January 2011, with the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act, Congress would cement that status, granting explicit authority for all agencies to spend up to $50 million per prize.11
As the prize authority scaled across the government, Kalil and I took turns attending the annual Visioneering Workshop hosted by the Diamandis’ nonprofit X PRIZE Foundation. This is where prominent philanthropists, CEOs, public officials, and even celebrity activists such as Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas would gather, on the grounds of Fox Studios in Los Angeles, to identify critical problems and then, over a three-day period, funnel ideas from broad to specific, until they were worthy of presentation to the public in the form of measurable, actionable challenges. I joined one conversation between Diamandis and a Qualcomm executive about the possibility of developing a noninvasive, instantaneous diagnostic medical device.
Six months later, at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, Diamandis and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs announced the Tricorder X PRIZE, named after the multifunction handheld device used for sensor scanning, data analysis, and recording data in the fictional Star Trek universe. The contest, with a $10 million top prize, gave entrants three-and-a-half years to develop a device capable of diagnosing 16 distinct conditions and five vital signs in a pool of people over a three-day period in late spring of 2015.12 Within a year, more than 230 teams from 32 countries had signed up to compete for the $10 million prize, including Dr. Anita Goel, a friend running a Boston-based nanotechnology startup, Nanobiosym, with an entry that runs a genetic analysis on saliva.
Also at the 2011 Visioneering Workshop, Google chairman Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy shared an update about a challenge that had emerged from the wreckage of one of the nation’s most tragic embarrassments. In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men and causing the largest oil spill in history. Day after day, for more than three months, television viewers watched oil gush into the gulf. Ultimately, a SWAT team of sorts, under the leadership of Nobel Prize–winning Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, in collaboration with British Petroleum, contributed to the successful capping of the well. Yet that still left the massive chore of slurping up all the sludge that had seeped into the water and toward the shore.
While the well was gushing, Diamandis received plenty of e-mails, asking him whether the X PRIZE Foundation considered contributing to the cause of capping the well. But he didn’t believe BP would cooperate enough for his organization to play a constructive role. He did, however, see a role in the cleanup, especially since technology in such efforts had not advanced much in more than two decades. Within 24 hours, Wendy Schmidt committed to serve as the sponsor. The Department of Interior offered technical support. The Shell Corporation provided some financial support. That allowed the X PRIZE Foundation to advertise a purse of $1.4 million, with $1 million to the grand prize winner, for the teams that could prove they could recover the most oil on the sea surface, at a minimum of double the existing record rate. Roughly 350 teams preregistered, with 35 ultimately revealing their designs. Ten were then selected for testing in New Jersey at Ohmsett, a Department of Interior facility with the largest saltwater wave tank in North America.
Diamandis anticipated that, at most, one team might achieve a doubling of the top rate through their efforts over the course of the 15-month competition. Even competitors with the deepest understanding of the industry initially thought his goal was too bold. Still, an Illinois-based company named Elastec took a shot, getting outside the box, asking its workforce of 140 to work around the clock to design a unique grooved skimmer.13 In the official test trial, winner Team Elastec recovered oil at a rate more than three times better than the gold standard, at 4,670 gallons per minute and an efficiency of 89.5 percent, and more than five times what had typically been recovered at Ohmsett. Six of the other top-10 entrants achieved the minimum requirement of double the record rate. That alone would have rendered the challenge a success. But that would ignore two other important insights: first, the amount of private capital relative to the prize purse, which Diamandis estimated at 20-to-1; second, the diversity of the participants, which included teams hailing from Norway and the Netherlands; a family from Alaska that used a father’s savings; and Team Vortex, led by a designer who doubled as a tattoo artist and partially funded by one of the artist’s customers.14
“You never know where the innovation will come from,” Diamandis said.
That idea, that innovation can come from anywhere, was the inspiration behind InnoCentive. Founded in 1998, and then spun out of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly a few years later, it is a for-profit marketplace that searches for problems in a variety of industries and then frames and poses those problems to potential solvers.
During his stint as InnoCentive CEO, from 2006 through 2012, Dwayne Spradlin attempted to perfect the art and science of challenge creation and presentation, in order to ensure that a competition would be a better tool than the tired strategies that have been tried again and again. That required paying attention to each step in a series: identifying a difficult problem, designing the applicable challenge, engaging the appropriate audience, dangling an attractive prize, and stimulating the development of a fresh, innovative potential solution.
First, in Spradlin’s view, it is essential that large organizations of all kinds—commercial, government, or charitable—run a rigorous “problem management program” prior to issuing any challenges. Pointing to the old adage that asking the right question gets the questioner 80 percent of the way to a solution, he lamented that “organizations are not terribly good at this discipline today.” In his view, an organization needs to identify a market need and manage “a very thoughtful process of structuring that into something that is well defined, understood; something that ties back to the strategic levers of the organization, which comprehends all the work that has succeeded and failed in the past” to shape a well-defined problem with specific associated criteria.
“Spending this time up front to thoroughly wrestle a problem to the ground before trying to solve it is not only the best use of up-front resources, it also fundamentally changes the character of the problem-solving efforts,” Spradlin said. “I get a much better picture now of what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and who may be able to help in solving that problem.”
Once the problem is precisely defined, organizations can prioritize it against others and assign proper resources to effect a desired outcome for their consumers, shareholders, benefactors, or—in the case of government—constituency. “What is it, why are we doing it, what is it going to impact, what levers does it touch, why have things failed in the past?” Spradlin said. “Then at the next stage, what audiences are we trying to target? And then with those audiences, you can define what those incentives will be, and based on those incentives, you finalize the competition design. Now I can roll that program out.”
One prize does not fit all. Thus, competition designers must carefully consider what will induce the desired audience to engage, understanding whether to appeal to intrinsic or extrinsic motivations. In the case of a public-good problem, such as slowing malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, Spradlin found the dollar amount to sometimes be a “disincentive,” with participants wanting to work on a problem that matters, focusing on how many they can help and perhaps, secondarily, on their own opportunity for fame and credit. So he recommended many foundations minimize money and maximize exposure—spending resources on inviting the world’s participation and celebrating those who succeed.
In most commercial challenges, however, Spradlin found that extrinsic motivators tend to take precedence, and “people want to get paid,” either in the currency of a cash prize or in the “opportunity for highlighting what you do in front of a crowd that could include venture capitalists that may fund your ideas as a startup.” After all, the participant is choosing not to engage in some other activity to allocate time to this one, and is aware of the possibility that someone else may profit from their solution. “You need to know, deep down, that you won’t feel foolish for this a year from now, so I sure hope the upside is worth it,” Spradlin said.
Spradlin places many governmental challenges in the middle of the motivational spectrum, between those presented by nonprofit and commercial entities: “If you are trying to drive a technical solution to a big problem for the Environmental Protection Agency, very often the problem itself won’t carry the same kind of public draw that a challenge for clean water in the third world would draw. Therefore, you sort of blend the motivations. We often recommend to those organizations a healthy prize amount and a reasonably healthy amount of money to be spent on driving awareness of the challenge and its impact for the public good, for public health, or for air quality . . . To do both.”
Spradlin applauded the federal government’s fundamental “changing of the environment,” helping to enable prizes and competitions as problem-solving multipliers; he called the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act that authorized them “a monumental step forward.”
“I think government is taking it very seriously, moving extremely quickly to sort of catch up to what has been available in the private sector,” Spradlin said late in 2012, adding that he had observed the federal government posing the correct questions and running the necessary pilots. “What I’ve seen happen in the last two, or two-and-a-half years, I would have guessed would have taken ten.”
While he spoke of government’s experimentation with prizes as still in its nascent stages, with looming questions about policy application, he was convinced these approaches were embedded enough to outlast any Presidential administration: “I don’t think either party has a vested interest in rolling back programs that can drive better government, more democratic involvement, and better and low-cost solutions.”
It would be odd for any person or entity to object to what the Air Force accomplished in 2011, with Spradlin’s assistance.
The Departments of Homeland Security and Defense had shared a common interest in addressing the issue of uncooperative vehicles—to reduce the risk to anyone here or abroad who might be endangered by a vehicle that violates a checkpoint or is fleeing an urban combat zone, or might be endangered by the use of presently available lethal tools designed to stop it. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in 2005, had initially turned to a typical government procedure. Through its Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR), DHS issued a request for proposals on the topic “uncooperative vehicle stopping using non-lethal methods,” and awarded a contract eventually worth $850,000 to the Arizona-based Engineering Science Analysis Corporation.15 That investment produced the SQUID, which entangled the wheels without harming the vehicle. But the SQUID, produced in 2009, had limitations: it needed to be prepositioned and then triggered into action at exactly the right time as the vehicle runs over it.
In 2011, the Air Force took off in a different direction, partnering with InnoCentive for the Vehicle Stopper challenge.16 “Quite wisely, the government opened up this challenge to new and novel ideas from anyone and anywhere in the world,” Spradlin said. The $25,000 prize attracted 1,071 initial competitors, 119 of which submitted detailed proposals. The winner was a sexagenarian from Peru, Dante Barbis. The retired mechanical engineer chose to implement currently available technology in an unconventional manner.
“Imagine taking a remote-control go-cart and making it launchable, so it can be shot very quickly from a vehicle at high speed and then controlled,” Spradlin said, with estimates of that speed at 130 miles per hour within three seconds of launch. “Now imagine this thing has an air bag on top of it, so we shoot it underneath the fleeing vehicle; we guide it right there, the airbag deploys. The fleeing vehicle then loses traction, spins, and comes to a stop, and then those in pursuit can surround and take control of that situation. A brilliant idea. Does it meet the generally logical needs of existing, dependable technology that can be deployed? Check. Relatively low cost? Check. Deployable in a variety of situations? Check. Highly effective? Check.”
At press time, the project was still in testing, but undeniably promising. Spradlin called it a “win-win-win across the board,” for the civilian population, for the military, for anyone involved in the process.
“Just a wonderful example of the potential here,” Spradlin said. “You compare this kind of program to what might have been a fully funded, long-term government program to come up with new nonlethal approaches to manage a situation like this, and it’s hard to imagine that not being a program in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. This has all the properties you want. Fast, quick to market, these are the kinds of things that can change the economics of innovation and drive very quick solutions.”
You might wonder from where the government-challenge competitors, and solutions, might come.
You might not think to look inside a Sizzler steakhouse. But that’s where Victor Garcia, an immigrant from Mexico, was working while pursuing an engineering career. At the time, he was taking classes in computer-aided drafting at ITT Technical Institute in California, but he wasn’t satisfied. Since he was a child, he had dreamed of becoming an inventor. Then, while waiting tables, he saw a commercial about a technical center that was designing muscle cars.
“I was like, ‘That’s cool!’” he recalled.
It was cool enough to alter his direction. He pursued a bachelor of science in transportation design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, then spent two years after graduation working with BMW in Newbury Park on all sorts of vehicles, including semitrucks, until landing in Texas as a part-time designer for Peterbilt Motors. There, in the Lone Star State, Garcia and his pregnant wife were waiting for the birth of their first child. They did so with excitement, but also apprehension. Without health insurance, Garcia was concerned about the costs of caring for a newborn. That’s when a different sort of challenge, a DARPA challenge, caught Garcia’s eye.
Acutely aware of the out-of-control costs and lengthy time lags inherent to acquisitions, the Department of Defense had set an ambitious goal: reducing the time it takes to design and develop weapons systems by 80 percent, while significantly cutting expense. To catalyze that effort, DARPA called for the design of an Experimental Crowd-Derived Combat-Support Vehicle or XC2V. It promised a modest $7,500 top prize, and promoted the contest through Local Motors, an open source automotive manufacturing enterprise with a community of 25,000 hobbyist innovators, from enthusiasts to engineers to fabricators.
“Immediately, my mind starts running,” Garcia said. “I grew up with GI Joes. I still have a ton and I collect them. I’m a big military buff, World War II, Civil War. It just intrigued me to do a military vehicle. And since it was funded by the government, DARPA, it seemed very real to me. I didn’t know exactly what it would look like, but I had a ton of ideas, so I had to jump on it.”
He had to, and not simply due to his desire to support his wife and unborn son. He had to, because he believed he had it in him. He believed he could win, even though the project was outside the scope of his usual work, even though many may have deemed someone with his background a sizable underdog, and even though he only had four weeks to complete what amounted to an immense undertaking. Buoyed by a supportive wife and boss, Garcia spent every available extra hour, late into the night, on sketches, illustration, and research. Too short on time to perfect the illustration, he felt good about the potential of the unique shape he submitted in March 2011. “I knew I would be in the top 10,” Garcia said. “But to hear the CEO of Local Motors say, ‘You are the winner—’ I was a little emotional calling my wife to say that I did it. I knew it was a huge thing for my family, to be able to cover my son. That was a huge weight off my back. And then, by June 21, he was born.”
Three days later, Victor met President Obama in Pittsburgh, for the unveiling of his creation: the XC2V FLYPMode. “I was very, very happy,” Garcia said. So was DARPA, learning plenty through the exercise about the power of social media for future R&D projects. And so was Local Motors, which earned a new client in Peterbilt. After a promotion to senior designer at Peterbilt, Garcia convinced the company to engage in its own private sector open innovation endeavor, inviting the Local Motors community to compete for a $10,000 prize, for the design of a fuel-efficient Class 8 sleeper cab tractor truck. And when Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors, spoke with Peterbilt, he was told, “They did 40 man years’ worth of work in four weeks.”
Garcia sees his unlikely story as representing a potential “paradigm shift” in America’s approach to major issues, including those related to the ways the nation protects its people, at home and abroad. For the conception and implementation of critical government projects, why must sluggish and expensive be the norm? Why should the idea hunt be limited to the same tired terrain, inhabited by the same so-called experts, directed toward the same established, expensive contractors? Why not venture into the wilderness, tapping into talent that others might have missed, talent itching to be taken seriously?
“Given a chance, there’s a voice that can be heard,” Garcia said. “I think this is an opportunity for somebody like me, who nobody would consider, to have a chance. Just give them the right criteria. We do have the resources. Sometimes we get caught up in the whole political thing, but it doesn’t have to be like that. Let’s not wait 10 years. Let’s make a change.”
Dr. Farzad Mostashari wasn’t willing to wait even 10 weeks before making his mark on the situation he inherited in 2011, as Deputy Director of the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The ONC had originated in response to President Bush’s bold statement in 2004 that every American would have access to a personal health record by 2014. Yet, due in part to a modest annual budget of $60 million, the agency’s achievements trailed that pace, with only 25 percent of eligible physicians and 15 percent of acute care hospitals adopting electronic health records as of 2010. Recall, as introduced in Chapter 6, that the agency had received a one-time $2 billion cash injection in 2009 as part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in the stimulus bill, to be spent over the next few years on the creation of a nationwide interoperable health information network.17 Then, a year later, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act further validated the HITECH Act by recognizing health IT as a critical enabler in health care delivery reform.
Even with all those enabling ingredients in place, Dr. Mostashari recognized that the agency needed to evolve from its legacy culture. That had emphasized process, largely measuring its success based on the amount of grants given to states, rather than on what the money actually produced. “We had to turn that around to say, no, no, no, if the country fails, we have failed,” he said. “And it’s not enough to have done things with the right form, we care about the outcomes. We had to give people the courage to do things differently. Our identity at ONC was to become government entrepreneurs, and that’s everybody from our grant management staff to our project officers. The core is, how can we see tomorrow as better than today? We’re not going to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them, and we’re going to look for opportunities for those disruptive innovations.”
That meant turning to cloud technologies to speedily support the expansion of their mission; putting a premium on accountability; and setting seemingly impossible goals, because in Dr. Mostashari’s mind, “When you know it is an impossible goal, then risk taking becomes less risky.” That also meant turning to different procedures, in concert with procurement, in order to achieve existing and ongoing objectives.
“You can either do a grant and you have no control, or you can do contracts, and then you’re paying through the nose, and there’s no incentive for them to really deliver cheaper or better, and you only get one shot at it—you do the wrong selection of who you are going to work with, you’re screwed,” Dr. Mostashari said. “Prizes and awards seemed like a great way to get out of that box of the typical government procurement options.”
Nor would it be a one-time trick. ONC would become the first agency to fully operationalize the prize authority that, a few months earlier, had been granted by the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act. Mostashari’s agenda was twofold: speedily surface a series of solutions while creating a culture of community problem solving. His first major foray, the Investing in Innovations (i2) Initiative, included the allocation of nearly $5 million to fund prize purses, and was supplemented by administrative support from private sources.18 As a primary partner, Dr. Mostashari wisely chose Health 2.0 LLC, an event planner that, since 2007, has been hosting conferences, code-a-thons, and challenges in the consumer health space. In October 2009, I addressed that organization’s annual conference and was overwhelmed by the size and passion of the audience: more than 500 developers, entrepreneurs, and health care professionals who had also brought their own ideas for lowering costs while improving quality through better wellness and prevention services. Those ideas, unlimited in terms of imagination, were limited in their financial potential by the predominant payment system in health care: fee for service.
As of this writing, ONC has sponsored more than 25 challenges tied to the use of information technology, with goals as varied as ulcer prevention, quality of life improvement for cancer survivors, and better reporting of medical errors. One representative example was the One in a Million Hearts Challenge, designed to complement HHS’s broader Million Hearts campaign to prevent one million heart attacks and strokes within five years.19 The winners were named in March 2012, with THUMPr taking the $50,000 grand prize—it was a web-based application through which users entered personal health profiles, then received unique recommendations for specific, actionable steps related to the ABCS (Aspirin, Blood Pressure, Cholesterol, Smoking Cessation) that would represent a healthy heart plan. The $20,000 runner-up, mHealthCoach, was submitted by South Asian immigrant Aamer Ghaffar.20 It was built on top of his startup’s $25,000 first prize winner in the Walgreens Health Guide Challenge, which took HHS data feeds, compiling the 20 most common questions related to cardiovascular patients, and providing a search engine for simple use by health guides Walgreens was employing to assist customers. For the HHS challenge, mHealthCoach leveraged social media sites Twitter and YouTube to supplement education with organization and enjoyment, allowing the user to integrate doctor’s appointments and gym sessions with a Yahoo or Google calendar, play games that demonstrate what happens to blood as it encounters exercise versus cigarettes, or even use maps to invite friends to fitness groups at nearby parks.
Ghaffar spoke of enjoying a sizable publicity and credibility boost from each challenge but reaping the greater overall reward from the public sector competition, even though the prize was $5,000 less. That’s because the two-way dialogue with HHS and ONC—as compared to the private sector sponsors—continued after the conclusion of that challenge. “They recognize that the next hurdle of innovation is the lack of deployment or feasibility trials,” Ghaffar said, explaining that the availability of such testing environments—the sort government has the power and impetus to provide—can make the difference for small enterprises limited in their financial resources and connections to power.
Later, Ghaffer would compete for other challenges, finishing second in an important one in the private sector, the Patient Engagement Blue Button Challenge sponsored by the Advisory Board Company.21 That was the latest in a long line of competitions related to the still-developing Blue Button movement, as private and public sponsors attempted to make consumers, even the technology-averse, more comfortable serving as the central hubs for their own health care information, and more responsible for sharing it. The Advisory Board stepped up to the sponsorship challenge based on the belief that the market was best suited to create simpler, more accessible, and appealing products—ones that would compel patients to make the downloadable Blue Button file a core component of their health care routines.
On the private sector side, the 2010 Health 2.0 Blue Button Developer Challenge produced a rather impressive winner. Michael Jackson (no relation to the international celebrity) didn’t have the money for college while growing up in Baltimore. So he worked as a power plant operator and enlisted as a Coast Guard reservist to earn money for college; then he earned an MBA and took several technology jobs before ultimately joining Adobe, the gold standard of graphic design software companies, in March 2010.22 The challenge, sponsored by the Markle and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations, gave Jackson a chance to, as he put it, “prove myself to Adobe, and prove what Adobe could do for the industry.” His cross-functional team worked for 60 days to finish a prototype, creatively converting the Blue Button’s raw dump of text into a more attractive and useful package, including features that allow the user to easily, visually identify trends or spikes in health measures such as blood sugar levels. After winning, Jackson got a shout-out from the CEO, Shantanu Narayen, at the company’s government conference and, even better, a promotion.
In search of a similarly uplifting outcome, Dr. Mostashari teamed with Health 2.0 in 2011 to present the Blue Button Mash Up Challenge, calling for competitors to create a broadly available application that blended Blue Button data with other data sources.23 Humetrix, a software innovator with a 15-year history, won the contest with its submission iBlueButton, which integrated eight different federal government data sources, all while taking the complicated coding and unwieldly length out of up to three years of Medicare claims history. The result? After logging on to the application, a patient—or the patient’s authorized caregiver—can tap a blue button to quickly download his or her Medicare record, and scroll down an organized, detailed list of diagnoses, medications, prescribing doctors (with contact information), allergies, hospital visits and stays, procedures, lab work, and even family history. With an extra click, the patient can receive additional contextual information, such as the potential side effects of current or considered medications, or preventative services, all drawn from those public databases. Then the patient can “push” his or her medical record to a provider who has downloaded a related app on a mobile device. After the medical professional accepts the transfer, they can review the record together, one bound to be more accurate than what the patient would recall from memory. And they can make more informed, collaborative decisions.
The Humetrix story, and the dozens of others that surfaced on account of Dr. Mostashari’s emphasis on prizes, further inspired him to institutionalize the approach, so that it would be sustained long after his tenure. He did so through the Federal Health Information Technology Strategic Plan, published in September 2011.
The prize tool for government innovators is gathering momentum, especially in the area of IT software development, which has been riddled with cost overruns. As noted earlier, Veterans Affairs had embodied the losing culture of government IT acquisition, with the nasty habit of contracting first—based on the fancy prose of some written proposal—without viewing a working prototype. Among the most egregious examples: a nearly decade-long, ultimately doomed, $127 million effort to help veterans schedule appointments with doctors, hospitals, and nursing care facilities online.
An audit report from The Government Accountability Office stated the situation plainly in 2011: “Unable to implement any of the planned capabilities. The application software project was hindered by weaknesses in several key management disciplines, including acquisition planning, requirements analysis, testing, progress reporting, risk management, and oversight.”
By then, Roger Baker—after assuming the role of VA CIO in 2009—had already overseen a thorough review of that and two dozen other underperforming major IT projects. He had suspended the scheduling project to stop the bleed, but knew that veterans still needed the service. With an assist from VA CTO Peter Levin, Baker launched the VA Medical Scheduling Contest—which we mentioned earlier. The challenge, with a total $3 million prize purse, fit snugly into Dwayne Spradlin’s characterization of ideal competition construction: a clearly defined problem with a logical connection to existing technologies that could be deployed at relatively low cost, and one that may not have surfaced through traditional models of government procurement.
Across the country, millions of well-meaning public servants, feeling restrained by bureaucracy, limited in authority, and shackled by shrinking budgets, can still lead in the prize movement. Take Tom Baden. As a teenager and into his 20s, he was a singer and strummer in rock bands, playing Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin covers and even sharing a stage with Yanni.24 Three decades later, as the Chief Information Officer at the Department of Human Services in Minnesota, he sought to make some noise inside state government by modernizing its historically siloed data systems.
After learning of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s $45 million Partnership Fund for Program Integrity Innovation, a fund to support innovations that reduced waste, fraud, and abuse, Baden began to assemble a coalition of states that shared a common interest in solving these problems, ultimately securing the support of Louisiana, Oregon, and Utah.25 He would scope a small enough project with sufficient impact to move forward—standardizing the registration process for doctors and hospitals when qualifying for Medicaid services. This targets the first of three stages during which states can intervene to thwart fake providers who cost them an estimated $11 billion in improper payments each year (the other stages being just before the claim is paid and after a claim is paid and deemed fraudulent).26 After winning the grant funding, Baden still needed to coordinate the project across the states, and he found a crowdsourcing vehicle called TopCoder—a highly competitive community for software development and digital creation, and one that had an existing agreement with a federal government “center of excellence” on prizes based at NASA. “What that did was take the complication out, which really accelerated the whole process,” Baden said.
Working with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and TopCoder, and facing significant skepticism, Baden’s team set the objective for the project: the creation of a screening tool to run background checks as well as identity, licensing, and financial verifications on newly enrolled providers. It followed the TopCoder formula of breaking down the project into smaller incremental parts, in this case 132 of them starting with conceptualization, with a prize for each piece ranging from $500 to $5,000 and “bug hunts” to reward hole pokers with small prizes to, as Baden put it, “Keep you honest every step of the way and drive up the quality of the product.”
Through his commonsense approach, Baden drove up the quality of government without doing the same to the quantity of dollars—as of this writing, his project is still on course to successful completion.
“The thing I like about TopCoder is that you only pay for the products that you like,” Baden said. “If you run a contest and there’s no winners, then you’re not paying anybody.”
While it is natural for prize sponsors of all stripes to welcome the way these crowdsourcing models keep costs down, by compensating only a select, successful number of participants, this model is not necessarily a favorite of all professional societies.27 For instance, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) has argued that such speculative work can devalue the design process, specifically the importance of feedback and experimentation to produce quality product; and that it can devalue the designers, diminishing the true economic value of their work.28 Designers have even created websites, such as nospec.com, to educate the public about the perils of spec work and to discourage their colleagues from performing it. And, in June 2011, more than 1,200 people signed a petition objecting to the Department of Interior’s $1,750 competition on crowdspring.com for a new logo for placement on clothing, one that complemented—but did not replace—the department’s existing seal.29
While recognizing people’s right to reasonably disagree about the methods through which prize competitions are administered, and even to choose not to participate in this process, I believe there will always be a pool of talent motivated more by the mission than the reward. Government is tapping into that spirit, by broadening the range of competition topics—beyond its larger budgetary responsibilities such as defense and health care—to include those intended to foster equality, justice, and social welfare. That’s precisely how members of President Obama’s cabinet have utilized competitions to address key, often-unfunded priorities—expanding government scope without an equivalent, unwanted increase in size and cost.
Start with equality. Hilda Solis, the Labor Secretary, took inspiration for her open innovation challenge from the 2012 State of the Union, in which President Obama declared that to create “an economy built to last,” America needed to “encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country. That means women should earn equal pay for equal work.”30 He had attempted to address this issue with the first bill that he signed in 2009, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which allowed for a longer time horizon for suing retroactively for pay discrimination. A follow-through attempt, the Paycheck Fairness Act, a preventative step designed to protect employees who share salary information at work from retaliation by an employer, died in Congress.
Solis assembled public and private salary data from sources including the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Salary.com, as well as cases brought through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for the purposes of supporting her Equal Pay Apps Challenge.31 She also convinced Professor Linda Babcock at Carnegie Mellon University to share her negotiating tips for others to incorporate into new tools. A team of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College, led by Rachel Koch, won one of the grand prizes with the Close The Wage Gap app, which offered more personalized advice, in an application that included a negotiation cheat sheet for women. Laquitta Martell-DeMarchant was an especially inspirational grand-prize winner. Her childhood had been shaped by watching her two grandmothers raise families without husbands, a hardship that forced their children to work in the cotton fields of Louisiana to raise extra money. She came to believe that if more women could achieve equal pay, it would eliminate some of the burden. Her iPhone- and iPad-accessible application, Aequitas, includes the ability to compare compensation by ethnicity, and she has used the prize perks—including a scholarship toward an eight-week immersive coding skills training program—to build her company, FuzionApps. She is even planning a Spanish-language version. The President invited Koch and Martell-DeMarchant to the White House in June 2013, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, explaining his administration’s desire to “help workers get the information they need to figure out if they’re underpaid. And thanks to innovators like Rachel and Laquitta, who are up here, we can now say, ‘There’s an app for that.’”
Thanks in part to Michelle Obama, there are now Apps for Healthy Kids too. That was a contest I conceived with two Cabinet Secretaries, Tom Vilsack of Agriculture and Kathleen Sebelius of Health and Human Services, in March 2010. This was what Dwayne Spradlin would classify as a participation challenge, one most concerned about generating the most possible awareness for an issue; to do that, we tapped into the First Lady’s passion and celebrity. The prizes, funded by the public and private sectors, were modest, totaling $60,000 for a dozen winners, whose diversity and commitment would speak to our success. Their winning submissions ran the gamut from an online tool (Pick Chow!) aimed at childhood obesity to Trainer, a game in which players create creatures, moving them around an illustrated map to satisfy their dietary and fitness needs while exercising alongside with a web cam. The winners’ backgrounds and motives were varied, too: parents concerned about caring for a sick child, a student class at the University of Southern California, and even entrepreneurs who had quit jobs to start businesses based on what they had created.
Sometimes, a challenge aimed at advancing social good can even lead to the birth of a new industry.
In 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that his department’s Vehicle Technologies Program would expand its relationship with the active Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE competition by providing a $5.5 million grant for technical assistance.32 The competition was consistent with the program’s redeeming mission, to develop vehicle technologies and alternative fuels that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lessen America’s dependence on foreign oil, and help the U.S. transportation industry remain competitive.
The prize itself was substantial, a total of $10 million raised privately, available to three teams—with $5 million to the winner—for the construction of safe cars that could achieve at least 100 MPGe (or the equivalents) in a real-world driving environment. To win the high-level prize for the mainstream class, a car needed to have four wheels, seat at least four passengers, and have a range of at least 200 miles. In this case, unlike the Apps for Healthy Kids challenge, the money mattered.
Oliver Kuttner had first become interested in competitions when he was 10 years old, winning a physics prize that had been sponsored by a defense contractor and airplane company. This one had a significantly greater payoff. “If it wasn’t for the prize, we wouldn’t have really looked at it,” said Kuttner, a Virginia commercial real estate developer; race driver; and automobile dealer, collector, and builder.33 “When we studied it, we realized the conventional wisdom just wasn’t right, and there were real misconceptions. One was that if you do an electric car, you have a chance to win, otherwise you don’t.”
With other competitors already several laps ahead, Kuttner had a need for speed. He swiftly assembled a team called Edison2, which set up in an abandoned textile factory in proximity to machine shops in Lynchburg. Kuttner leaned on the team’s experience in the racing world to produce results quickly and to recognize that weight and safety weren’t mutually exclusive. At 830 pounds, its four-passenger Very Light Car wasn’t much heavier than the average motorcycle. “When the car showed up, everyone laughed at it,” Kuttner said. “Then they figured out they couldn’t get within halfway of us on the consumption end.”
For an initial $2.7 million outlay, including some assistance from investors, Edison2 not only captured the $5 million prize, but put itself on an inside track to pioneering the ultra-lightweight car industry. By the spring of 2012, it had spent an additional $8 million to continue developing and redesigning the vehicle in an attempt to bring the safest, most effective lightweight car to the mainstream market.
“If a large car company decided to do this, I can guarantee they would not be where we are if they spent 10 times as much,” Kuttner said.
He got a tailwind in 2012, when the federal government raised corporate average fuel economy standards, putting pressure on car manufacturers to innovate in order to achieve a near doubling of standards to 55 MPG by 2025.34 Word had spread of Kuttner’s initial—if, by his own admission, incomplete—achievement. So calls started coming in, with inquiries about the incorporation of some of his technology into other companies’ existing product lines, or even about the possibility of bringing to market some version of the Very Light Car itself. And, in 2013, he introduced an electric-powered version that he intended to take to market.
Some social justice challenges hit closer to the heart.
Such was the case for me, a father of two daughters, when I spent my 39th birthday alongside members of the President’s cabinet, for a meeting that Vice President Biden had convened to address sexual assault and dating violence against high school and college-aged women. Biden had long championed this issue, aware of the alarming statistics that nearly one in five college women will be victimized by sexual assault, and one in 10 teens will be hurt by someone they are dating. We set out not only to help prevent such attacks, by giving women improved tools to safely and discreetly communicate distress but also to help women better connect to resources in the aftermath of an assault. Biden and Secretary Sebelius launched Apps Against Abuse, challenging developers to create applications that make women less vulnerable.35
Nancy Schwartzman learned of the challenge from a Twitter follower who had seen her 2009 documentary film, The Line, which featured footage of her confrontation with the acquaintance who had raped her. Schwartzman’s Twitter contact suggested that she compete as a means of complementing the film, which was screening on college campuses. She deemed that silly. “I’m a filmmaker,” she thought. “I don’t know how to make an app.”
That was July. In late August, she e-mailed her colleague Deb Levine in California who had done text (SMS) work related to safe sex and HIV for youths, and they agreed to blend that technical expertise with Levine’s access to young people. Schwartzman knew, from all her outreach, that college students tended to stay inside their bubbles and networks, eschewing assistance from off-campus services, including law enforcement. She also knew students would only use an application that spoke their language and acknowledged their lifestyles, which meant she needed to solicit their input, make it simple, and avoid any judgmental features. College students party off campus. They often drink, and sometimes lose their bearings. The point wasn’t to stop such activities, but to make students as safe as possible in any situation. Nor did she want the application to appear threatening, with an alarm or a danger icon, because—as she was advised by a domestic violence survivor during a crowdsourcing stop at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse—that might alert and anger a snooping, abusive partner.
Working with a designer that Schwartzman had used for her film work and an engineer to write the code, the team worked up to the competition deadline. Her team worked pro bono, Schwartzman characterizing the exercise as “a perfect coming together of people who want to make a difference.” Their concept was Circle of 6, a casual, social, gender-neutral application that appears as an attractive, but still inconspicuous, icon on a smartphone, one that allows users to choose six trusted friends for their circle—and then, by tapping the phone twice, send a preprogrammed SMS alert message with an exact location or request an interrupting phone call. It also allows users to call two preprogrammed national hotlines or a local emergency number of their choice.
On November 1, 2011, Vice President Biden announced that Circle of 6 was a cowinner of the Apps Against Abuse Challenge, calling it “a new line of defense” for young people against violence in their lives. That validation, and the subsequent interest and excitement, convinced the Circle of 6 team to go beyond the competition, and get the product in as many hands as possible. Even with a small grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a small investment from Motorola Mobility, and a rousing reception at the CTIA Wireless Convention, they found financial resources scarce. True to her documentary filmmaking background, Schwartzman kept scrapping. She managed to get a tiny mention in Cosmopolitan magazine, which led to thousands of downloads before the product’s official launch.
Schwartzman has received testimonials from female college students around the nation—including one at Cornell who had been fearful due to reports of a guy groping girls around the dark, vast campus; and another at Duke who now feels more comfortable studying late at the library. She’s heard from women who use the call-me function to excuse themselves from creepy dates, from young professionals in cities who use the GPS capability to get picked up in unfamiliar neighborhoods. She’s heard from massage therapists and house cleaners who use it just to let people know where they’re working. Schwartzman heard from families who put their grandparents on Circle of 6 so they know the latter’s whereabouts, which she thinks is “really adorable,” and parents who do the same for their teenage children when the latter start driving (“so there’s no question that they’ll come get their kids anytime, anyplace”).
“It’s becoming a care network for each other,” Schwartzman said.
Not just in America either. While presenting at the United Nations, Schwartzman fielded requests for translations to countless languages.
“The GPS is international, we have two hotlines built in, and one is customizable,” she said. “If you are in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, England, or Germany, these are all the places we’ve heard that are using the app.”
The global impact became clearest to Schwartzman in 2012. After the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern in New Delhi, India, Schwartzman began to notice a spike in downloads from that region, from a few hundred to several thousand, making it the second-largest market for the app behind the United States.36 To assist those users, she launched a New Delhi version in April 2013, one translated into Hindi and able to provide local hotlines and resources. She even enlisted a Bollywood superstar, John Abraham, as a celebrity endorser.
In the fall of 2013, Circle of 6 crossed a milestone: 100,000 downloads. And Schwartzman wasn’t stopping, working on a version for Mexico City officials. Through Tech 4 Good LLC, she is working with her team to make the app a commercial enterprise.
All of the above represented progress in problem solving, by thinking in ways big and small, but mostly smart. That was the aspirational vision that President Obama had articulated, after he first bridged the few blocks between the White House and the National Academy of Sciences in April 2009. President Obama used that stage to call for a fresh approach toward confronting America’s most confounding quandaries. He invoked one of his greatest predecessors, the one who used the Civil War as an opportunity to innovate, not stagnate. “Lincoln refused to accept that our nation’s sole purpose was mere survival,” President Obama said. “He created this academy, founded the land grant colleges, and began the work of the transcontinental railroad, believing that we must add—and I quote—‘the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery . . . of new and useful things.’ This is America’s story. Even in the hardest times, against the toughest odds, we’ve never given in to pessimism; we’ve never surrendered our fates to chance; we have endured; we have worked hard; we sought out new frontiers.”
Today, we need to explore new frontiers not only in terms of the problems we try to solve but in the manner in which we attempt to solve them. Collectively and creatively. Much more is possible, if the government makes the populace part of the process, so the greatest number of people can assemble and share their ideas and gifts for the greater good.
As Obama put it, “I think all of you understand it will take far more than the work of government. It will take all of us. It will take all of you.”
Tom Kalil certainly understood that, as he continued taking steps to scale and cement prize policy throughout the government, including his February 2012 recruitment of the chief operating officer of The X PRIZE Foundation, Cristin Dorgelo, to join the administration. Together, they would champion the already-bustling Challenge.gov platform. Over the first three years since its start in 2010, that platform hosted roughly 200 competitions that were sponsored by more than 40 federal agencies—with those agencies receiving design and execution support from the new NASA Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. The Challenge.gov program itself won Harvard’s prestigious Ash Center Innovations in Government Award in 2014.37
But this isn’t just about milestones already achieved and accolades already earned. The real power of prize policy is where it can take us.
“You change people’s views of what is possible,” Kalil said. “If I said to you a couple of years ago, California is going to pass legislation to create a legal framework for self-driving cars, you might have looked at me like I was crazy, right?”
That, however, is what’s happening. Aiming to get soldiers out of harm’s way, DARPA issued a series of Grand Challenges starting in 2004, with a Grand Challenge defined by Kalil as, “Ambitious yet achievable goals that capture the public’s imagination and that require innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology to achieve.”38
This one called for the replacement of one-third of America’s ground fleet with autonomous vehicles by 2015. In the first trials, none of the robot vehicles completed the 150-mile route alongside Interstate 15 from Barstow, California, to the Nevada border. In 2005, DARPA ran a do-over, on an even more winding, mountainous, turn-heavy course. Twenty-two of the 23 entered vehicles went farther than any of the vehicles the years before, and five completed the course, paced by Professor Sebastian Thrun’s Stanford Racing Team and its Stanley vehicle. Google later hired the Stanford talent to further demonstrate the vehicle’s safety, and the company’s subsequent breakthroughs compelled California Governor Jerry Brown to sign SB 1298 into law in October 2012, allowing for testing of Google’s self-driving cars on the road, with a human passenger along as a safety measure.39 Cadillac, a division of General Motors, has predicted it will be manufacturing fully autonomous cars by the end of the decade.
Imagine that. Or software that replicates the personalized approach of a premier tutor. Or green buildings that produce all the energy they consume. Or increasing access to health care for pregnant women in the developing world by at least 50 percent. Or making solar cells as cheap as paint.40 Those were among the lofty long-term ambitions that the President outlined in his Strategy for American Innovation.41 That report inspired an interim measure, the SunShot initative to make solar cells as cheap as coal by 2020. That Grand Challenge inspired a prize competition, the $10 million Race to the Rooftops challenge, with an even more tightly defined goal. The windfall prize goes to the first team to install solar panels across 5,000 rooftop systems, at $1 per watt—as measured by the nonhardware costs of permitting, interconnection, and inspection.
When that prize is awarded, we’ll all win.