Have a brilliant idea about how to clean up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Pitch it to the X Prize Foundation and you just might win a couple million bucks.
Sounds like a darn good incentive for helping out the environment at a time when it's desperately needed.
Francis Béland, X Prize Foundation Vice President of Prize Development, announced that the foundation is seriously considering creating a new competition at the TEDxOilSpill Conference in Washington, D.C. on Monday, June 28.
"Creating a challenge is a rigorous process," Michael Timmons, a representative from the X Prize Foundation, told Discovery News. "The company is only on the beginning steps."
The X Prize Foundation fosters inventiveness: current contests promote the development of novel lunar robots, fuel-efficient cars, and ways to sequence DNA. For each competition, the grand prize is at least 10 million dollars.
The proposed competition capitalizes on the public’s preexisting desire to bring the BP oil spill disaster to a halt. In an interview with CNN, Béland said that 35,000 ideas were previously submitted to BP, the government, and numerous organizations including the X Prize Foundation.
"The challenge would not target fixing the BP oil spill, but focus on solutions for cleaning up oil spills in general," Timmons explained.
Earlier this year, InnoCentive, an organization similar to the X-Prize Foundation that provides public "Challenges" to solve humanitarian problems, launched an identical campaign to gather oil spill solutions, minus the cash.
The organization gathered 908 solutions. But when InnoCentive contacted BP about utilizing the suggestions, BP turned them down.
Whether the oil company takes advantage of the X Prize Foundation’s multimillion-dollar idea remains to be seen.
But don’t let BP’s apathy stop you -- it is not stopping the foundation from developing the competition. The company has already put together a committee of experts to discuss the competition's qualifications.
Tags: Geoengineering, Geology
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