About HeroX, “The World’s Problem Solver Community”: “On October 21, 2004, Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne reached the edge of space, an altitude of 100km, becoming the first privately built spacecraft to perform this feat, twice within two weeks.
In so doing, they won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE, ushering in a new era of commercial space exploration and applications.
It was the inaugural incentive prize competition of the XPRIZE Foundation, which has gone on to create an incredible array of incentive prizes to solve the world’s Grand Challenges — ocean health, literacy, space exploration, among many others.
In 2011, City Light Capital partnered with XPRIZE to envision a platform that would make the power of incentive challenges available to anyone. The result was the spin-off of HeroX in 2013.
HeroX was co-founded in 2013 by XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, challenge designer Emily Fowler and entrepreneur Christian Cotichini as a means to democratize the innovation model of XPRIZE.
HeroX exists to enable anyone, anywhere in the world, to create a challenge that addresses any problem or opportunity, build a community around that challenge and activate the circumstances that can lead to a breakthrough innovation.
This innovation model has existed for centuries.
The Ansari XPRIZE was inspired by the 1927 Orteig Prize, in which Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. The $25,000 prize had been offered by hotelier Raymond Orteig to spur tourism. Lindbergh’s flight lead to a boom in air travel the world over.
A similar challenge had launched 200 years earlier with the 1716 Longitude Prize, which sought a technology to more accurately measure longitude at sea. Nearly 60 years later, a British clockmaker named John Harrison invented the chronometer, which spurred Trans-Atlantic migration on a massive scale.
In 1795, Napoleon offered a 12,000 franc prize for a better method of preserving food, which was often spoiled by the time it reached the front lines of his armies. The breakthrough innovation to Napoleon’s prize led to the creation of the canning industry.
HeroX incentive prize challenges are designed to do the same — to harness the collective mind power of a community to innovate upon any problem or opportunity. Anyone can change the world. HeroX can help.
The only question is, “What do you want to solve?”… (More)