XPRIZE Turns to the Crowd to Design Its Next XPRIZEs in Energy, Food & Environment for Visioneering 2018

XPRIZE partners with the HeroX crowdsourcing platform and invites
innovators around the world to design and submit XPRIZE concepts for the
2018 Visioneering Event

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#Visioneers–Today, the XPRIZE
Foundation announced an open
call to innovators around the world to help it design future XPRIZEs
in five key areas: Off-Grid Energy for the Developing World, Saving
Coral Reefs, Disaster Prediction, Lifting Farmers Out of Poverty and
Feeding the Next Billion. For the first time, XPRIZE will use the HeroX
crowdsourcing platform to source hundreds of XPRIZE designs, and
submitting teams may be selected to ultimately compete to further
develop their concepts for future XPRIZEs.

Normally the XPRIZE Foundation turns to its internal team or external
experts to develop competitions, and then asks the crowd to solve its
grand challenge competitions. Instead, this year XPRIZE is using
crowdsourcing at the beginning of its prize development process, as well
as to, eventually, actually solve the challenges.

ÔÇ£At XPRIZE, we believe the crowd is able to attack and solve the worldÔÇÖs
grandest challenges. This year we are also testing the hypothesis that
the crowd can also design XPRIZEs in a fashion that will help us get our
work done faster, better and cheaper,ÔÇØ said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis,
XPRIZE founder and executive chairman. ÔÇ£We believe that the best way to
predict the future is to create it yourself. Building on HeroX and our
annual Visioneering Summit, we look forward to taking the crowdÔÇÖs
participation to the next level and empowering the public to architect
the future.ÔÇØ

Teams entering the 2018 Visioneering Prize-Design Challenge will have
the option to watch a brief ÔÇ£MasterÔÇÖs ClassÔÇØ video on designing an
XPRIZE taught by Diamandis, and then submit their detailed prize design
entry. Their entry will include their proposed name of the prize, the
prize purse, the detailed competition rules and much more. Teams can
enter as many times as they wish. Entries from around the world are
encouraged.

The winning teams from the HeroX competition will win a variety of
prizes valued in total at more than $100K. This includes event airfare
and hotel, and access to XPRIZEÔÇÖs Visioneering event; plus cash purses
ranging from $10K to $25K. The designers of the best concepts submitted
through HeroX will work with XPRIZE experts to refine their prizes
before taking a global stage later this year at the Visioneering Summit.

This year, XPRIZE is also fortunate to have support from Accenture. The
global professional services company is providing expert innovators and
impact designers for each of the five key areas. These teams will
simultaneously work on their own competition designs under a separate
track.

More detail on the key areas and sponsors include:

1. Energy of the Future, sponsored
   by KinGo: KinGo aims to bring progress to off-grid
   communities through decentralized clean energy. The Energy of the
   Future prize aims to foster breakthrough innovations around energy
   generation technologies that will enable humanity to eradicate energy
   poverty as 1.2 billion people around the world still live without
   access to power.
2. Saving Corals Reefs, sponsored
   by the XPRIZE Ocean Initiative: The XPRIZE Ocean Initiative
   is a commitment to design and launch five ocean XPRIZE competitions
   with the vision to make the ocean healthy, valued, and understood. The Saving
   Coral Reefs prize seeks urgently needed innovations that can scale
   to protect and restore coral reefs.
3. Natural Disaster Prediction,
   sponsored by Fairfax Financial Holdings: Fairfax Financial
   Holdings Limited is a holding company which, through its subsidiaries,
   is engaged in property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, and
   investment management. The Natural Disaster Prediction prize
   aims to save lives and prevent economic loss through better mechanisms
   to predict and prevent the impact of natural disasters such as
   earthquakes and hurricanes.
4. Lifting Farmers Out of Poverty,
   sponsored by Gagan Gupta: Gagan Gupta, based in
   Gabon, Africa, is passionate about creating a revolutionary
   marketplace for farmers. The Lifting Farmers Out of Poverty
   prize is focused on exponentially increasing the income for millions
   of farmers living on less than $2 dollars a day.
5. Feeding the Next Billion,
   sponsored by The Tony Robbins Foundation and Foundation for Food and
   Agriculture Research: The Tony Robbins Foundation is a
   nonprofit created to empower individuals and organizations to make a
   significant difference in the quality of life of people often
   forgotten. The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research,
   established through bipartisan congressional support in the 2014 Farm
   Bill, is a nonprofit that builds unique partnerships to support
   innovative science addressing todayÔÇÖs food and agriculture
   challenges. The Feeding the Next Billion prize is focused
   on ensuring that the 10% of the growing global population that remains
   undernourished has access to nutritious food produced in a sustainable
   way.

There are three phases to the HeroX Visioneering 2018 Design
Competition: Phase I: Ideation, Phase II: Design Hackathon, and Phase
III: Visioneering Summit.

• To enter Phase I, XPRIZE invites the public to choose a focus
  area and submit a high-level prize design concept paired with a
  two-minute video pitch for evaluation to XPRIZE by July 23.
• In Phase II, up to three HeroX semi-finalists in each focus
  area will be invited to an all-expenses paid trip to XPRIZE
  Headquarters in Los Angeles in August to attend a two-day Design
  Hackathon and pitch their competition concept. The semi-finalist HeroX
  teams will work with experts out of Accenture, XPRIZE Innovation Board
  members, and XPRIZE staff during a two-day event aimed to vet,
  redesign and improve the prize designs. One HeroX team from each focus
  area will be chosen to receive a $5K cash prize and advance to Phase
  III.
• In Phase III, the annual XPRIZE Visioneering Summit will bring
  together 300 leading world-renowned executives and innovators for
  three days to evaluate and fund competition designs. The teams
  selected to attend Visioneering will present their ideas on the
  mainstage and advocate for their competition designs to receive
  funding from the Summit participants. If an idea from a HeroX team is
  then selected to move forward beyond Visioneering, they will receive
  the HeroX Visioneering 2018 Design CompetitionÔÇÖs top $25K cash prize.
  The top-performing design at the Visioneering Summit will emerge as
  XPRIZEÔÇÖs Design of the Year.

To learn more about the HeroX Visioneering 2018 Design Competition
including deadlines, submission requirements, and full judging criteria,
and to sign up for the challenge, please visit: www.herox.com/xprizevisioneers-2018-design-challenge.

To learn more about Visioneering 2018, please visit: xprize.org/visioneering.

ABOUT XPRIZE

XPRIZE, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is the global leader in designing and
implementing innovative competition models to solve the worldÔÇÖs grandest
challenges. XPRIZE utilizes a unique combination of gamification,
crowdsourcing, incentive prize theory, and exponential technologies as a
formula to make 10x (vs. 10%) impact in the grand challenge domains
facing our world. XPRIZEÔÇÖs philosophy is thatÔÇöunder the right
circumstancesÔÇö igniting rapid experimentation from a variety of diverse
lenses is the most efficient and effective method to driving exponential
impact and solutions to grand challenges. Active competitions include
the Lunar XPRIZE, the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, the $15M Global
Learning XPRIZE, the $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE, the $7M Shell Ocean
Discovery XPRIZE, the $7M Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE,
the $5M IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, the $1.75M Water Abundance XPRIZE and the
$1M Anu & Naveen Jain WomenÔÇÖs Safety XPRIZE. For more information, visit www.xprize.org.

ABOUT HEROX

Founded in 2013, HeroX exists at the intersection of crowdsourcing,
competition and collaboration. The HeroX crowdsourcing platform brings
together global communities of problem solvers to deliver breakthrough
solutions to social, economic, and strategic challenges. To learn more,
visit www.herox.com.

Contacts

XPRIZE
Katherine Schelbert, 424.835.3127
[email protected]