Ratan Tata Helps Bring Multi-Million Dollar X-Prize to India

The US-based non-profit X-Prize has set up massive incentives (think, $10 million or $15 million) for innovators to crack challenges in health, education, and the environment.

The LA-based organization will take its first foray abroad to India.  A new Mumbai chapter of X-Prize debuted in December, initiated by Ratan Tata, former chairman of one of India’s largest conglomerates, Tata Group.

“We are bringing X-Prize to India with the belief that the next big innovation to solve of the world’s Grand Challenges will come from India, directly impacting millions of people at the base of the pyramid.  Through X-Prize, we want to tap into this promise of potential and possibility,” he said.

India fit the bill for X-Prize. A developing country, yes.  However, its strengths in entrepreneurship, sciences, and technology align seamlessly.  As it is, India has been referred to as the hotbed of social innovation with thousands of social enterprises cropping up, aspiring to find market-driven answers to the country’s woes.

X-Prize outlines India’s challenges in these 8 categories: energy, learning, food & nutrition, shelter, water, social justice, waste, global connectivity.

That’s an audacious list.  But that’s what X-Prize does creates an incentive for bold results.  Its first successful prize was the Ansari X Prize aimed at creating a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 km above the Earth’s surface, twice with in two weeks.   In 2004, $10 million was awarded to Scaled Composites, an aerospace company in the Mojave Desert of California for design Spaceship One. Today, Virgin Galactic relies on Scaled technology for their new venture into space.

X-Prize is hoping for similar results in India.  If successful, they want to scale it beyond the subcontinent, building similar prize-based schemes in South America, Africa, and Asia.

The prizes in India would be catered to her needs: assisting the semi-literate get education and a better skill set, resolving transportation problems, disposing of waste, getting nutrition to the malnourished, and building renewable energy sources.

Tata is one of an impressive list of advisers on X-Prize’s Executive Board. Other heavyweights include Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, James Cameron (filmmaker) Navin Jain, Arianna Huffington, and Elon Musk.

“X-Prize will make a new India.  It really could change things for a nation of a billion people,” Tata said at the launch in Mumbai.