Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prizes

Foresight is proud to offer two Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prizes that aim to jointly improve the lives of 1 billion of the world’s poorest people by 2020, a Personal Manufacturing Prize, and a Water Liberation Prize. The prize outlines are below, and are subject to revision before the deadlines.

Personal Manufacturing Prize :

An industrial infrastructure to provide the products and employment that elevates illiterate and semi-literate people in emerging economies to an intermediate level of human development can take decades to build. With the success of China in assimilating so much of the global economy’s low-cost manufacturing output, many of the world’s poorest nations have no opportunity to construct and secure their own manufacturing sector. Hence, this stage of human upliftment has become a chasm that many nations are finding difficult to cross.

But if manufacturing itself can be brought to the scale that cottage industries operate in, then the scale of Chinese mass-manufacturing is no longer a requirement to be cost competitive. A technology that removes the fixed costs and volume necessities associated with heavy manufacturing can reduce the barriers to entry for the manufacturing of many commodity goods, and drive costs to unprecedented lows. The RepRap project is a self-replicating machine that could provide a disruptive influence in democratizing access to the manufacturing of commodities. An incentive-driven approach to the invention of such a technology at suitable cost targets would yield the maximum benefit.

The key resistance points are presently the percentage of the self-replicated machine that can be replicated by a parent machine, and the availability of a suitable material that is sufficiently low in cost. Until the overwhelming majority of the machine’s parts are self-replicated, the true benefits are not yielded, and until the material used is inexpensive enough to surpass the cost barriers met by high-volume mass production, self-replicating machines are not fully competitive.

There will be two Personal Manufacturing prizes, awarded by a panel of judges. The first ‘interim’ prize of up to $20,000 with an award date of December 31, 2012, and the second ‘grand’ prize of up to $80,000 with an award date of December 31, 2015.

Interim Personal Manufacturing prize

The winner of the PM interim prize will be the inventor who can make a 3-D printer that can demonstrate the following:

• Print at least three different materials, including one that is usefully electrically conductive.
• The ability to print electronic circuit boards.
• Print beds† must be of a material which may be reused with minimal refurbishment for at least 20 print cycles.
• Maintain a total materials and parts cost under $200 and that 90% of the volume of the printer parts be printed. ††
• Demonstrate a build volume of the printer above 300x300x100mm in order to insure that items daily utility can be printed.
• The capacity to print a full set of parts for a complete replica of itself within 10 days unattended save for clearing no more than one printer head jam.
• The ability to print autonomously without a PC attached.
• Uses no more than 60 watts of electrical power.

†Print beds are flat surfaces onto which parts are printed.

††Print beds are not necessarily a permanent part of the printer and are not figured into either the cost or the volume requirements of a printer.

Given the open-source nature of the RepRap community, the winning entry for the interim prize will have its technology published for the RepRap community to use, and the winning entry for the grand prize will also be published for open use.

Grand Personal Manufacturing Prize

After the entries submitted for the Interim prize are available publicly, the open-source dynamic of the RepRap community will proceed from there.

The current generation of RepRap technology takes up to three weeks to print a full set of parts. 90% of this time is consumed in supporting tasks like positioning and reloading the printer, and replacing print plates, etc. Only 10% of the time is used for actual printing. The Grand Prize would seek to make the technology more rapidly scalable by increasing the productivity of the replication process. As a bonus, the Grand Prize may additionally be helpful in recycling material waste (such as plastics) into material suitable for RepRap use. Plastics such as HDPE and Polypropylene, of which millions of tons exist as waste matter, may be suitable candidates, and recycling of such waste material would be viewed favorably by the judging panel.

There are three parameters that will be used to judge the efforts of the teams participating in the competition.

• That the cost of the material used for printing does not exceed $4/kilogram.
• The capacity to print a full set of parts for a complete replica of itself within 7 days, including the time for reloading, and clearing of printer head jams.
• Maintain a total materials and parts cost under $200 and that 90% of the volume of the printer parts be printed.

The committee envisions a variety of technologies which might be deployed to achieve this end including :

• Software to drive and manage banks of RepRap printers
• Hardware and software systems to automatically unload printed parts from RepRap printers
• Hardware and software systems to sort, clean and package or assemble printed parts
• Innovations in plastics recycling, and development of a suitable grinder and extruder

The nature of the competition and the requirements for participants are as follows :

• While teams participating in the competition for the Grand Prize will register at the beginning of the competition, it is not expected that the membership of said teams will necessarily remain static thereafter. Any teams can merge with each other if so desired.
• Participating teams are expected to regularly publish and make available their technology on an ongoing basis. All technology developed by participating teams becomes open source under a GPL or BSD license. Therefore, the winning team will have to have published at least some of their innovations more than 12 months before the deadline.

(Note that the RepRap Project itself is licensed using the GPL, so any entry derived from that is constrained also to use the GPL. Any entry not derived from the RepRap Project can use either license.)

It is expected that participating teams will borrow each others’ better innovations during the development process. The committee reserves the right to apportion the Grand Prize amongst teams should such borrowed technology comprise a major portion of the winning entry.

Water Liberation Prize

At least 2 billion humans, or 30% of humanity, do not have access to clean drinking water. This includes 40% of the world’s children under the age of 15. A lack of access to clean water is the root cause of multiple problems, from fatal conditions like dehydration and diseases such as cholera and dysentery to the indirect costs of lost productivity. That this most basic of problems still affects such a large percentage of humanity demands a solution that can overcome traditionally existing obstacles, such as a lack of rainfall, irrigation, and access to electricity. An incentive-driven approach to the invention of such a self-reliance device at suitable cost targets would yield the maximum benefit.

A device available for under $5, that can produce enough drinking water for a single adult, would cause a net annual economic benefit of $500 for the recipient in the economy that they presently reside in. The $500 estimate is the sum total of disease reduction, death rate reduction, and productivity increase that access to this water would result in. These gains would be cumulative for each subsequent year as well. Lastly, such a device would enable human settlement at greater distances from traditional water sources, as long as atmospheric humidity was above a certain level. Clearly, the $5 water purification device is a very compelling product for a humanitarian organization to distribute en masse.

The winner of the Water Liberation Prize of up to $50,000 will be the first person to invent a device that is either solar powered, manually cranked, or otherwise not dependent on the existence of an electrical grid, can produce at least 4 liters of potable (drinkable) water per day, either condensed from the air (as measured in approximate 50% ambient humidity) or filtered through a nanomembrane, and can be mass-produced (as demonstrated by a pilot run of no less than 100 units) for a cost of less than $5 per unit. The filter should be washable and re-usable, without requiring a periodic supply of new filters, as the device may be used in areas without access to a suitable distribution channel.

The prize will be awarded on December 31, 2015, by a panel of judges.

Support the Gada Prize

Prizes in Science and Technology

An Important Stimulus for Breakthrough Thinking

Although scientific grants today are the most common source of funding for scientific and technological research, prizes awarded for specific accomplishments have played an important role in the advancement of science and technology. In the 18th and 19th centuries, prizes were the most common form of funding for scientific advancement. That was particularly true in France, the leading scientific nation of that era. Goal-specific prizes remain important today as a means to stimulate breakthrough thinking. The Feynman Grand Prize offered by Foresight Institute thus continues an important tradition in the funding of scientific and technological advance.

The Longitude Prize

One of the most famous prizes in science history led to the development of accurate nautical navigation. Skilled mariners have known for more than two millennia how to establish their latitude. However, accurate positioning at sea also requires knowing the ship's longitude. The means to do so had eluded the world's best thinkers for centuries. As the leading maritime power in the 18th Century, England had a vast strategic interest in finding a useful means for its ships to establish their precise location at sea. Thus, the English Parliament passed the Longitude Act of 1714. It specified a prize of £20,000 (equivalent to about $2.5 million in today's funds) for the person who devised a reliable means for a ship captain to establish his longitude within half a degree of great circle (30 nautical miles at the equator). Two smaller prizes were also designated for lesser accuracy.

Although scientists of the era sought celestial solutions to the problem, the question ultimately was answered not by an astronomer but rather by a clock maker, John Harrison. He designed and built the world's first chronometer - a special clock capable of keeping accurate time under the adverse circumstances of life at sea. By comparing the difference between the time of a known location and the ship's local time (established by the sun's position), navigators could tell longitude accurately. An early test voyage proved Harrison's chronometer's ability to establish longitude within a few miles through the duration of a trans-Atlantic voyage.

The Orteig Prize

In 1919 Raymond Orteig, a wealthy French hotel owner, offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York City and Paris. In 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh won the prize in a modified single-engine Ryan aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis. Others had been pursuing the prize diligently, using different approaches. Two weeks after Lindbergh's feat, Clarence Chamberlain and Charles Levine flew nonstop from New York to Germany in a Bellanca monoplane. A month later U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd and a crew of three also crossed the Atlantic, in a Fokker trimotor. Their efforts changed the way people thought about flight, and about the world itself.

The Orteig Prize was one of many offered to stimulate the development of the fledgling aeronautical industry. Between the first flight by the Wright Brothers and 1929, over 50 major aeronautical prizes were offered by governments, individuals, newspapers and corporations. In 1926 and 1927, Daniel Guggenheim offered more than $2.5 million in prizes and trophies.

The Kremer Prizes

The Kremer Prize for Human Powered Flight was offered in 1959 at £5,000 by British industrialist Henry Kremer. It grew to £50,000 (worth $95,000 at that time) before it was claimed by Dr. Paul MacCready and his team in 1977 for flying a figure eight along a half-mile course with his Mylar-skinned Gossamer Condor. Kremer immediately offered a second prize of £100,000 for the first human powered aircraft to cross the English Channel. Only two years later, MacCready's Gossamer Albatross won that prize as well. The lightweight construction techniques MacCready developed for these human-powered aircraft contributed to MacCready's more recent design for the General Motors Impact, the first modern car designed "from the wheels up" as an electric vehicle.

Prizes Offered by Richard Feynman

A defining moment in the history of molecular-scale technology was a 1959 speech at the California Institute of Technology by Nobel Laureate physicist Dr. Richard P. Feynman. "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," he declared in his discussion of the possibilities of molecular-scale engineering. To spur work in that direction, he offered $1,000 prizes from his personal funds to the first person to construct a working electric motor 1/64 inch or less on a side, and to the first person to produce written text at 1/25,000 scale (the size required to print the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin).

The motor prize was claimed in 1960 by an engineer who found a way to construct a very small motor using conventional mechanical techniques. Dr. Feynman had unfortunately set the size limits slightly too large to require breakthrough technology. He paid anyway. The printing challenge took longer; but in 1985 a Stanford University graduate student named Thomas Newman reproduced the first page of Charles Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities, on a page measuring only 1/160 millimeter on a side (20 times smaller than the human eye can see), using electron beam lithography. Dr. Feynman paid that prize enthusiastically, since it had produced technological advance.

Super Efficient Refrigerator Prize

In 1992, a consortium of U.S. electric utilities, seeking to enhance environmental quality and energy efficiency, announced a prize of $30 million to be awarded to the most energy-efficient refrigerator design that did not using environmentally harmful CFC refrigerant. Fourteen manufacturers submitted entries. The winning company, Whirlpool Corp., devised a refrigerator that used 25% less energy than the most energy-efficient available model before the contest, and 40% less than the Federal energy efficiency standard for new refrigerators.

The Ansari X Prize

The Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X Prize Foundation offered a US$10,000,000 prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. It was modeled after early 20th-century aviation prizes, and aimed to spur development of low-cost spaceflight.

Created in May 1996 and initially called just the "X Prize", it was renamed the "Ansari X Prize" on May 6, 2004 following a multi-million dollar donation from entrepreneurs Anousheh Ansari and Amir Ansari.

The prize was won on October 4, 2004, the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch, by the Tier One project designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, using the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. $10 million was awarded to the winner, but more than $100 million was invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize.

Several other X Prizes have since been announced by the X Prize Foundation, promoting further development in space exploration and other technological fields.