We are living in an era of extraordinary disruption. The technological, sociopolitical, and economic changes taking place around the world present innovators with an opportunity to apply groundbreaking research to challenges of worldwide importance.

Technologies on an exponential growth path (such as advanced robotics, ubiquitous sensors, synthetic biology) are rapidly becoming a part of our daily lives. These exponential technologies have the potential to lead to innovative solutions to some of the world’s grand challenges. Importantly, many of these exponential technologies critically depend upon advances in materials science. Advanced materials are at the heart of innovative solutions to many of the world’s biggest problems and opportunities.

The XPRIZE Foundation relies on the growing power of exponential technologies and revolutionary science to catalyze radical breakthroughs. By offering a suite of incentives, XPRIZE seeks to inspire the world’s scientists, technologists, and innovators to tackle seemingly intractable challenges.

“Grand Challenges” are a part of today’s dynamic period of disruption. It is now possible for us to not only characterize massive, global threats and opportunities that might affect billions of people, but also to conceive of possible solutions. Listing grand challenges—poverty, climate change, a cure for cancer, total planetary exploration—may sound trivial, but in reality, framing a grand challenge requires understanding the complexity and nuances involved in both defining a problem and envisioning the characteristics that will define a solution.

XPRIZE uses an incentive prize model to challenge anyone to solve a grand challenge. This model capitalizes on the millions, if not billions, of potential solvers in the world and enables the demonstration of novel approaches. An XPRIZE includes an objective set of criteria that teams have to achieve; it empowers an independent judging panel of leading experts to evaluate the solutions, and allows anyone the opportunity to demonstrate solutions in real-world environments.

Grand Challenge: Reimagine CO₂

Grand Challenge: Shell Ocean Discovery

Previous XPRIZE challenges have opened space exploration to private interests around the world (the Ansari XPRIZE), advanced hyper-efficient automobiles (the Progressive Automotive XPRIZE), and led to a quad-rupling in the rate of oil spill cleanup technology in just over a year (the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE).

Less than a year ago, the Montana-based winners of the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE demonstrated unprecedented performance and cost gains for measuring the pH of the oceans—the critical first step in combating ocean acidification, a devastating environmental grand challenge in the making. These winners and the other five finalists all relied on a suite of technologies, science, and engineering to demonstrate a diversity of ways of measuring ocean chemistry in harsh environments. Unsurprisingly, advances in materials science were at the heart of many of these breakthroughs, including embedded chemical sensors, optode sensing, and high-pressure microfluidic or potentiometric systems.

XPRIZE recently launched two new prizes that tackle two grand challenges: the carbon dioxide emissions that drive climate change, and our poor ability to properly explore the oceans that make up the majority of our planet’s surface.

The NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE is a USD$20 million global competition to incentivize technologies that convert CO₂ emissions into valuable everyday products, such as building materials and alternative fuels. Teams from around the world will compete for more than 4.5 years and through three increasingly difficult rounds of competition. Teams will have the opportunity to use the flue gas coming from either a coal-fired power plant or a natural-gas-fired power plant as a feedstock. The winning teams will convert the largest quantity of CO₂ from actual flue gas into one or more products with the highest net value. Judges will take into account production costs, market prices of product(s) produced, and market volumes of product(s) produced.

After proceeding through a technical submission evaluation and then a labscale demonstration, 10 finalists will utilize two new test centers—one adjacent to a coal-fired plant and the other to a natural-gas plant—and demonstrate their solutions at scale.

The Carbon XPRIZE is built to catalyze breakthroughs in carbon conversion, to showcase the ability of new approaches to utilize CO₂ instead of allowing it to escape into the atmosphere. Converting carbon dioxide is a part of a broader effort to mitigate CO₂ emissions using carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). CCUS technologies have the potential to become a major player in climate change mitigation, especially if they enable a responsible way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from electricity generation.

However, CCUS is not without challenges, and has been dismissed by some critics as too expensive, too risky, and too enabling of the continued use of fossil fuels. The Carbon XPRIZE is intended to inspire and enable radical new solutions. This includes materials that help capture and purify carbon dioxide, materials that can enable immobilization (and thus transportation and/or storage) of CO₂, and materials involved in the complex process engineering throughout the system.

For carbon conversion, only incredibly advanced catalysts and related process materials can enable a change in the thermodynamics associated with converting CO₂ into other materials. Conventional wisdom has been that CO₂ conversion is too expensive and energy-intensive to thrive in markets dominated by fossil hydrocarbon feedstocks. But an emerging set of technologies and policies, based on advances in materials in particular, may shift the energetics and cost curves to the point where CO₂ conversion could be poised for a radical leap forward. Finally, the products that can be made from converted CO₂ run the gamut of advanced materials, including novel ceramics and graphene, for example. The Carbon XPRIZE is built upon the advances of materials science and seeks to propel the field and its potential for solutions even further.

Another one of humanity’s grand challenges is to explore what is beneath the ocean. Oceans cover two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, and yet we know less than 5% of what is out there, whether it be biological or geological. The primary reason we remain in the dark is because, until now, the technological capabilities to explore the ocean at the scale and speed necessary were not available.

The Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is a USD$7 million competition for the development of technologies to map the deep-sea floor at high resolution and produce high-definition images of the ocean. Embedded within this is a USD$1 million NOAA Bonus Prize to develop pioneering underwater sensors that can autonomously detect and trace a biological or chemical signal to its source.

With these, we hope to usher a new era of ocean exploration through which we expect to find new materials needed to survive and progress as a society. Our limited knowledge of the ocean has already given us additional sources of minerals such as manganese; we have found marine life that can camouflage itself, conduct electricity in seawater, or create its own light source; and we have discovered new compounds for the development of medical cures for Alzheimer’s disease, various cancers, and AIDS.

Operating in a water environment has, historically, only been accomplished by the marriage of materials science with engineering. Seawater is a corrosive medium, and the challenges of creating technology that can maneuver electronics on and through water, often under high pressures, has called for innovative approaches. Recent advances in materials are of direct relevance to the solutions for the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE. Graphene, for example, may be used to detect the gas molecules that constitute a chemical signal, paving the way for the novel underwater “sniffing” devices incentivized by the USD$1 million NOAA Bonus Prize. New materials are allowing for the miniaturization of technology and improving optical capabilities, paving the way for multiple small innovations that would map the deep-sea floor and produce high-definition images from the dark ocean environment.

XPRIZE hopes to incentivize anyone to try a new solution and reward the most radical new solutions. But this is just part of a broader trend, one that gives us both hope and an expectation that our biggest challenges can be solved. We have the tools, remarkable scientific knowledge and capacity, big thinkers, and anyone can be a part of the solution.