X PRIZE Visioneering and The Mother of All Business Plan Competitions

I’ve participated in dozens of business plan competitions over the years. I concluded that they are a lot fun, but that they do little more than educating students on the fundamentals of starting a business. They create a lot of heat and light but hardly any motion. There are few competitions winners who have made it big. I spent the weekend, however, participating in a competition that was really different and that promises to change the world. There were so many great ideas that emerged from this that judges said they would fund some of the losers themselves. This was at the X PRIZE Visioneering Workshop, in Beverly Hills, CA. The participants weren’t MBA students; they were a hundred of the greatest engineers, scientists, and thinkers in the world. Many had already built billion-dollar businesses. The attendees included Eric Schmidt (Google), Dean Kamen (Segway inventor), Ratan Tata (Tata Group), Simon Worden (NASA), Aneesh Chopra (U.S. CTO), and Carl Bass (Autodesk)—and some entertainment-industry celebrities such as James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic), Will I Am (Black Eyed Peas), Jim Gianopulos (Fox Studios), and Ali Velshi (CNN). And senior executives of GE, GM, Novartis, Celgene, Shell, Kauffman Foundation, PepsiCo, Qualcomm, and Sprint. The purpose of the meeting was to brainstorm on what radical innovations can be created over the next two to eight years that will positively affect humanity; to conceive ideas on creating new industries; to challenge the conventional wisdom on what is, and what isn’t, possible. These ideas, documented in the form of a short business plan, will form the basis of new X PRIZE incentive challenges . This is what the X PRIZE Foundation does: it develops ambitious ideas, defines achievable targets, and challenges entrepreneurs to create innovative solutions to implement them. And it offers millions of dollars in bounties to those who succeed.