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15. 
Writing the final set of rules.
The rules are an incentive competition's DNA—they will determine the competition's success or failure and its validity over time. Rules that are made invalid by changing technology or political/social conditions are problematic. Rules that are naive or easily broken can lead to negative or empty results. Consider the case of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's famous prizes announced during his 1959 lecture “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” Feynman offered two $1,000 prizes, one for the first person to build a working motor within a one-millimeter cube and the second for the first person to write the information from a book page on a surface 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale.
²⁴
The rules for his first prize were poorly conceived. While Feynman was looking to promote nanotechnology, what he received instead was a working motor built by an enterprising graduate student using meticulous craftsman skills and conventional tools (jeweler's tweezers and a microscope). Feynman paid the prize but didn't achieve his goal. That said, in 1985, Tom Newman, a Stanford graduate student, successfully captured the second Feynman prize by reducing the
first paragraph of
A Tale of Two Cities
by 1/25,000.
²⁵

•  •  •

Today, the XPRIZE spends a lot of time thinking about fundamental objectives. How to achieve a goal without specifying the exact process and how to avoid a false wins (i.e., that micro-motor built from conventional tools). At the beginning of a competition, we propose a set of guidelines that are publically distributed and open for comment. There is extensive discussion with the teams and then, months later, the guidelines are converted into a final set of rules. At the unveiling of SpaceShipOne, Burt Rutan noted, “It's amazing that the rules for the XPRIZE are still valid today, nearly eight years after they were announced in 1996.” This was an important lesson.

With all of the parameters above in mind, now it's time to design, build, and launch your own challenge. The HeroX Platform can help you do this, or you can make it happen on your own. Here are the steps involved:

1. IDEATION. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM YOU WANT TO SOLVE?

Identify the key issue. What problem keeps you up at night? It can be technological, social, or market-based. What paradigm do you want to change via competition? What might the world look like after the prize is won? Work to identify the market failures that led to this impasse. Peel back the layers and determine what's at the core. This ideation phase will help you to identify which parts of the problem are best to
focus on solving.

2. GUIDELINES AND METRICS. WHAT PARAMETERS ARE YOU MEASURING?

Your next step is to define the key attributes of success. What do you want teams to achieve during the competition? What does the finish line look like? What are you measuring? How will you measure it? Is it cost-free to judge your competition or labor-intensive? Is the target too audacious? How will the public (or your community) perceive the objective you set?

3. THE OTHER DETAILS: NAME, PURSE, DURATION, AND IP

• 
Name
. What will you name your challenge? You're looking for something recognizable, easy to remember, cool, and snappy—something that captures the essence of the competition and spreads virally.

• 
Prize purse.
How big will you make your purse? How much is the solution to this problem worth? The goal is a purse large enough to attract innovators, but not so large that it encourages the old guard to compete. The right purse is typically enough to cover the baseline costs an innovative team might spend. Also, if you're short on cash, crowdfunding is an option, but be sure to choose a prize name, objective, and MTP that motivates your community to contribute.

• 
Duration and format.
Most prizes should have a deadline (which you always have the option to extend). How long do you think it should take to solve the problem? Remember, shorter deadlines drive greater risk taking, but deadlines that are too short can keep teams from entering. What is the best structure for your challenge? Will you award the first team to achieve a minimum threshold? Will you make it an annual competition, in which you reward the best performance each year on a certain
date (think Olympics)? Each approach can bring great benefits, but each has different cost implications for operating the challenge.

• 
Intellectual property.
Who owns the IP at the end of your competition? If you don't have to own it and can allow teams to retain the innovation, then you may get more teams competing. You can alternatively ask them to give you a license or put it into the public domain.

4. POLISHING YOUR PRIZE DESIGN

Before you launch your prize, take the time for one more rules review. Here you want to optimize the competition around the following parameters:

• Make it hard to cheat. Remember the Feynman prize example, where a graduate student built a micro-motor with tweezers. Can you improve your rules to prevent this sort of cheating or false win?

• Examine the rules to make sure that the key indicators are sufficiently objective and measurable. Put differently, make sure you know how to pick a winner. Can your judges easily determine success, or will it require expensive and exotic equipment? Answering these questions ahead of time will save you considerable heartbreak later.

• Have you estimated how much it will cost to run the competition? Can you figure out cheaper ways to host it, judge it, promote it?

• When you explain your competition to your friends, do they clearly understand what a team needs to do in order to win? Can a child explain it to his/her parents across the dinner table? Do you have an easy-to-communicate
one-line pitch?

• Is the winning moment of the competition sufficiently telegenic that big media will be interested? Or have you designed a boring competition where winning of the challenge is determined by a single bit changing from a zero to a one at the end of a printout?

• If your prize is actually won, will the winning technology actually cause the impact you desire? Will it solve the preexisting market failures? Will it birth a new industry?

5. LAUNCHING YOUR CHALLENGE, REGISTERING TEAMS

Your next goal is to launch your competition above the line of super-credibility. You need to get media and social networks buzzing about the challenge, and you need to create an easy mechanism for newly excited teams to register for the competition. You also need to consider where teams might come from—universities, small companies, your employees, your local community—and make sure your launch is aimed at the right communities. Remember, teams are the core of your incentive competition; recruiting them and meeting their needs are paramount to success.

6. OPERATING YOUR CHALLENGE

Most people don't realize that operating an incentive challenge is not free. In fact the cost of operating an XPRIZE is often equal to the purse itself. Running the competition, interfacing with the teams, dealing with the legal work, making sure the playing field remains level, handling the PR, and so forth requires staff and time. The process can stretch from months to years. Make sure you have the resources in place to meet such challenges.

Even with HeroX, which offers a platform that facilitates most of these requirements while significantly reducing operating costs, challenges still require the following elements to succeed:

• 
Legal.
To register, teams must sign a robust agreement that outlines the rules of the competition and what happens under different circumstances. In my experience, the best practice is to create an easy mechanism for newly excited teams to express interest in the competition. A simple form that gathers their contact details works well. Participants then need to sign on to a Master Team Agreement, prepared by your legal counsel, which is effectively a contract that stipulates what a team needs to do to win, what rights you retain and what rights they retain.

• 
Prize Lead.
Someone to be the face of the competition, who can speak about the vision and the mission and field the hard questions that always emerge.

• 
Community and Team Manager.
The person who engages with the teams and the community as a whole. They're there to answer all questions and ensure the competition produces maximum impact.

• 
Judges.
A group of individuals who are completely independent who will help you determine a winner.

7. JUDGING, AWARDING, AND PUBLICIZING

The final phase of your competition involves determining the winner. Judging involves making sure that you, all the teams, the media, and the public know—in a noncontroversial manner—who won and why.

Next is the awarding of the purse (and trophy, etc.). Here the goal is to maximize the promotion of the winning moment. Celebrate the winner(s), sponsors, judges—really, everyone involved. The goal is to effect deep change. This can be accomplished only via exposure. A lot of people need to know this seemingly impossible challenge is now solvable. This is why having a telegenic finish is so important.

Over the course of the last few years I've defined my own massively transformative purpose. After a few iterations and false starts, I find that I'm happiest with the following: “To help entrepreneurs create extraordinary wealth while creating a world of abundance.” This MTP comes from the realization that the world's biggest problems are also the world's biggest business opportunities. These problems are modern-day gold mines. The bigger the issue, the more valuable and important the solution.

And the number of players in the world who are able to mine this gold and take on such challenges has exploded. A few hundred years ago, such activities were solely the domain of royalty. A few decades ago, they belonged to national leaders and the heads of multinational corporations. But today, almost anyone with a passion has the power to bring real change into this world.

Ultimately, that has been the point of this book. The exponential technologies discussed in part one give us the physical tools for radical change, the psychological strategies described in part two are the mental framework for success, and the exponential crowd tools that fill part three provide all of the additional resources (talent, money, and so forth) needed to cross the finish line.

Here's the most important point: Abundance is not a techno-utopian vision. Technology alone will not bring us this better world. It is up to you and me. To bring on this better world is going to require what could easily be the largest cooperative effort in history. In other words, there is a bold and bright future out there. But, as with everything else, what happens next is up to us.

And this brings me to my final thoughts. In
Abundance
, Steven and I closed the book with a section on the dangers of exponentials. This time we're turning our attention to leadership. The importance of this topic was raised by Marcus Shingles, an innovation leader from Deloitte Consulting whom we met earlier in this
book. “The coming age of exponentials will put game-changing technologies in the hands of everyone,” said Shingles. “And while this will no doubt lead us down the road to abundance, it also has the potential to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few. To navigate the turbulent times ahead, we will need a new breed of ethical leaders who are not corrupted by such absolute power.”
²⁶

Shingles's call for a new caliber of moral leadership is indisputable and well timed. And while this book has been about bold entrepreneurship and bold impact, we want to close with a call for bold leadership.

Most evil is done in the dark. Dictators and despots oppress women, children, and minorities in secret, when few are watching. But, in the exponential times ahead, in a world of a trillion sensors, drones, satellites, and glass, someone will always be watching. While this raises serious concerns for privacy, it also offers us hope for the end of oppression and perhaps the beginning of an entirely new breed of moral global leadership.

Who will be the Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mahatma Gandhi of the exponential age? Our history tells us that this breed of leaders is extremely rare and often underappreciated at first glance. Perhaps such leadership will materialize from experimentation in virtual worlds, or emerge from some crowdsourced competition, or be yielded over to a benevolent artificial intelligence. Each is, for the first time ever, a real possibility. Perhaps such leadership will arise the old-fashioned way, from those few concerned citizens willing to suffer the long and lonely hours it takes to see farther and hope further and build bridges across the seemingly vast chasms that still so frequently divide us.

One thing is for sure, in those immortal words of Voltaire (famously stolen by Stan Lee for
Spider-Man
): “With great power comes great responsibility.” And each of us, like it or not, are now the recipients of great power. This means we now have the power to solve the world's grand challenges and create a world of abundance. But this also means triumphing over age-old bad habits. Greed, fear, slavery, cruelty, tyranny—haven't these curses outlived their usefulness?

Think about how far we've come. Shelter is among our oldest needs, yet right now we can 3-D print ten single-family homes in a day. Health care ranks right beside shelter. And sometime in the next five years, we'll be able to diagnose disease via AI—and thus democratize health care. We have been reaching for the stars for as long as we have been able to tilt our heads upward and gaze in wonder. And sometime in the next ten years we are going to launch our first asteroid mining mission. No doubt about it, we are a species built for bold. But without bold leadership to help us set the course, our history also tells us that we can wander in the desert of bad decisions for a mighty long time.