Many of you have heard of the “X Prize”. It’s a series of challenges, mainly focused on space technologies, like suborbital flights, lunar landers, lunar rovers, and so on. At $350K to $10M, it’s a pretty nice prize.

The problem is the goals: Building our own lunar lander is in no way cheap. It took BILLIONs of 1960s dollars to build a manned device. Unmanned devices take tens of millions of dollars. Even if you were able to build a budget (say, $25K) device, you still have to deal with a multi-million dollar launch cost (the bigger it is, the more expensive to send it up).

The result of which is who you’re seeing as competition in these X Prizes: People who already have boatloads of money. Teams like Scaled Composites aren’t little shops with scrappy guys making do. Scaled made its money off of defense industry contracts. An assload of money. (Someone has to make those non-metallic radar domes.) Armadillo? The founder of id Software (makers of Doom, etc).

The only small (father-son) team at the X Prize Cup didn’t seem to be getting very far with their “in the garage” project. Spaceflight is dangerous and expensive. Go ahead and try and put your laptop computer in a rocket. Between the g-forces and the radiation it will be toast in seconds. There’s are reason why that stuff uses old, well known, robust tech. Because something that works on your desk will NOT work in space, unless you really “harden” it.

I have the same problem with the DARPA prizes (ex. build an unmanned car that can navigate the desert, or an urban environment). The idea is great, the prizes are good, but the only players are the (already) well off university teams. Don’t get me wrong, I love what the MIT and Mellon people do, but they already have huge budgets, lots of equipment, and so forth. Hardly the grassroots innovation that these prizes say they foster. And the grassroots is where real innovation happens. The Apple, the HP, the Google. They started with two people who innovated with very little money and a shitload of hard work.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have those typical small-scale prizes. You know: The science fairs, the bridge building contests, the mouse trap cars, and so on. They are all cool, and can get kids interesting into engineering, but they aren’t really all that difficult. Moving up the scale you have the robot people. Tougher stuff, yea, but still built on fundamental off-the-shelf stuff (ex. remote control cars).

What I think is missing is a middle ground. Something that is tough enough to bring out the bright minds, but simple enough that it doesn’t take a millionaires bank account to win.

Space, while being super-cool, is out of the question. Even sub-orbital flights cost a lot of money, and anything you shoot into the air is tightly controlled by a bunch of different government agencies (the FAA being the primary one). Too much money and red-tape. So, let’s look at ground challenges. You can have some sort of small car-like challenge, but that’s already being done. (And all the robot guys would probably swoop in and win. Not much fun.) So what’s left? Water.

Here’s the idea for The R Prize:

You must create a non-motorized device capable of traveling several miles down a river. During the trip the device must collect at least two different data elements (ex. current water temperature, speed). 

I like this concept for a couple of reasons:

• It levels the playing field. A lot of people have done land-based stuff, but I’ve seen very little with water.
• No motive power means the biggest engine doesn’t win–because there are no engines or complicated (and expensive) control systems.
• The collection of data gives a nice technical challenge. You have to have sensors which are water-proof.
• Floating down a river introduces a whole bunch of wildcards. What if it’s too big and gets stuck in low branches? Has to cross a dam? Rocks?
• It’s something that can be done cheaply. My initial estimates come in well under $1000 for a robust device.
• I can make it more difficult by introducing data transmission into the requirements (ie. you must transmit collected data real-time to a base station).

I’m really big on keeping this a level playing field–I do not want some big team to swoop in and hurt the chances of the parent-child and individuals out there. To do this, I’m putting together a point system, which I’m still working on. Basically, you get points for crossing the line first. You get points for doing things below a certain amount (and get points taken away if you spend too much). The dollar based points are based on actual average retail value, so a team can’t come in with a “donated” $10K piece of equipment. You get points for the quality of the data. And so on.

I’d welcome any feedback or other ideas. As I build-out the points system I’ll post it up. The key is I want a challenge that:

1. Is tough enough to get people thinking
2. Is cheap enough to involve individuals and small teams
3. Is balanced enough so that any team could win
4. Is exciting enough to get the whole community involved.