By Vivek Wadhwa
Vice President of Academics and Innovation, Singularity University.

The technology industry has a gender problem. The vast majority of its Venture Capitalists are male as are the founders of its startups and its technology heads. Even the boards of its public companies are dominated by males.

It isn't that women are not up to the job. The problem is that they are discouraged and left out. During childhood, girls are often sent the wrong signals by their parents. When they go to school, girls with an interest in engineering and science are called "tomboys". When they defy the odds and become scientists or engineers, women are often treated as inferior and passed over for promotion.

Sadly, the deck has always been stacked against women--right through the ages. For example, in the 1730s, a brilliant woman mathematician, Emilie du Châtelet, translated and popularized Sir Isaac Newton's arcane Principia Mathematica, and created a foundation for Einstein to develop his theories. She inspired Voltaire's writings. But she received almost no recognition and few have ever heard of her. Similarly, a century later, Marie Curie, performed pioneering research on radioactivity for which she received two Nobel prizes, yet she is less of a household name as Kim Kardashian.

But things are changing. Women are achieving greater success as Google and Makers.comhave documented. They becoming more confident, assertive, and are helping each other as my research has shown. And women are speaking up.

Sheryl Sandberg told her amazing story in a best-selling book, Lean In. The book was powerful but subjected to intense criticism because this is her story--a privileged woman in Silicon Valley. Many women said that they could not relate to this.

To bring to life the stories of average women all over the world, I am working with journalist Farai Chideya to crowd-create a new book. This will put the role of women in innovation into a historic perspective and then look forward. The book will discuss the challenges women have faced in different fields of innovation; how they achieved success as entrepreneurs and in the workplace; and strategies companies have employed to diversify their pool of talent and support women moving up the ladder.

Our goal is to provide a resource for women to learn from each other. We are crowdsourcing everything--including the funding of the project on Indiegogo. Our hope is that hundreds of women participate in this project. We will post detailed essays that women write on our website www.InnovatingWomen.org, and Farai will summarize their stories and distill their knowledge in the book. All of the proceeds from the book and whatever we raise on Indiegogo in excess of our costs will be used to support women to learn about advancing technologies at Singularity University's Graduate Studies Program and to fund their startups.

As I have often said, this is the most innovative time in human history--when entrepreneurs anywhere can solve big problems. Many technologies such as robotics, AI, 3D printing, nanomaterials, medicine, and synthetic biology are now advancing exponentially. This is making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve humanity's grand challenges. These challenges include the shortages of food, clean water, and energy and the problems of disease and health. Women will undoubtedly play a very important role in this new era of innovation. But we must level the playing field for them.

With crowd-sourcing of insights and funding, we can now more than ever enable women to solve our grand challenges.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

By David Schafran
David Schafran is co-founder and CEO of EyeNetra, Inc. He mixes entrepreneurship, technology, and humanism to super-humanize the world.

Billions of people worldwide are walking around with sophisticated scientific measurement instruments in their pockets ― although they may not realize it. It's their mobile devices, and they have the potential to dramatically change health care economics by performing high-quality biometric testing without trained personnel or bulky, expensive equipment.

Closing the Testing Gap

Testing is the first step in diagnosing and treating health problems. And, in enhancing ourselves to "super-you" levels (the promise of the Quantified Self movement). But, because of various barriers, it often doesn't happen.

Consider eye care, for example. The barriers in the US are mostly regulatory or bureaucratic: you must get a new prescription every one to two years depending on the state, take the time to get to an optometrist, and pay at least $100 for an eye exam if you're like the two-thirds of Americans without vision insurance. In the developing world, the barriers are more fundamental: lack of access to trained eye care professionals, costly and immobile testing equipment, and disorganized and disconnected fulfillment chains. As a result, an estimated 2.4 billion people in the developing world who need glasses don't have them.

By replacing the over-engineered solutions of yesterday with simplified, user-oriented devices that run on or with consumer mobile devices, we can create diagnostics that empower patients to administer high-precision tests for eye care and many other conditions ― just as easily as they can use a thermometer or glucometer today.

A New Era of Direct-to-Consumer Testing

This opens up the promise of a new era of direct-to-consumer testing. Imagine the ability to take an ECG using a small device attached to your smartphone. Or to take an eye test at home or at the local pharmacy. Or to continually monitor blood chemistry for a diabetic condition or response to chemotherapy without going to the doctor's office.

3D printing and other technology advancements are dramatically improving hardware economics, enabling inventors to quickly design, test, refine and manufacture innovative scientific measurement devices that run on or with consumer mobile devices. Even more important: cloud computing, advanced analytics and software are enabling entrepreneurs to build new back-end ecosystems for these devices.

Linking tests with solutions ― with help from doctors ― will reduce costs and enable patients to access more solutions, less-expensive solutions and more personalized solutions. Doctors - in person or via telemedicine - will interpret the results of tests and help steer patients to the right solutions. Data that's collected can be analyzed to provide more customized care. Far from being replaced by mobile-based diagnostics, doctors will become more like coaches and less like technicians.

When applied to traditional health care delivery models, these new ecosystems could revolutionize the delivery of everything from primary care to chronic care.

For example: today eyeglass vendors go direct-to-consumer with eyeglasses; in the future, eyeglass vendors will be able to go direct-to-consumer with testing for precision measurements. When the two steps ― testing and fulfillment ― are linked, the direct-to-consumer health care transaction is completed. And the whole system has become a lot less costly because it no longer depends on sophisticated training and expensive equipment to administer testing.

Better Living Through Continual Testing

But the big win is not cost savings ― it's personalized medicine. Consumer-facing testing devices are the gateway to personalized medicine, because they can accrue data in a continual, contextual manner. We can aggregate data over the cloud to a supercomputer like IBM Watson to provide insights into not just your health but also your personal potential ― with the doctors of the near-future helping you reach that potential.

Initially, mobile-based devices will bring testing to the home or close to it (e.g., pharmacies, health clubs or grocery stores). Future devices will be designed with human behavior in mind, creating a simple experience that removes complications while engaging consumers more fully in the process of quantifying themselves. Most of the heavy lifting will be done in the background by software. For example, eye doctors will be able to track your eye health over your lifetime ― efficiently and economically. The eye exam ― which today takes place once or twice a year in your doctor's exam room under one unique visual environment ― will be replaced by an ongoing series of mobile-device-based tests taken as you go about your daily business. With precise, more-frequent data, your doctor will be able to deliver better solutions for you throughout your lifetime.

Direct-to-consumer testing with mobile consumer devices will eventually be the de facto way that we test. Everywhere. The impetus for change is clearly there ― and it's already being championed by the consumer.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

By Ramez Naam
This is Part Three of a five-part series by Ramez Naam, Singularity University Adjunct Faculty, exploring the power of innovation to boost our access to energy, food, water, raw materials, and human population. All are based on his new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.

In Part One and Two of this series I showed that we have access to a huge amount of potentially available energy and food on the earth, both stemming from the tremendous input of solar energy to the planet.  We have very serious energy and food challenges, which cannot be dismissed. But the challenges are not in the form of a hard limit - they're in the form of a race between innovation and consumption.  Victory in this race is certainly not guaranteed.  But the most important variable - how quickly we innovate - is one we can affect through our policies.  That's a topic we'll return to at the end of this series.

Now let's turn to water.

We live on a water world, yet only a tiny fraction of our precious h2o is fresh water.  And around the world, the easy supplies of fresh water are being rapidly depleted.

The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest body of fresh water in the world, is now little more than a dry lake bed.  The Ogallala aquifer under the great plains of the United States - an underground body of 'fossil water' deposited during the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago - is seeing its water level drop by three feet a year in some regions.  Water tables in Mexico, in Iran, in India, and in China are dropping at rates of 6, 10, or even 20 feet per year.

Rivers that were once mighty are increasingly being overpumped as well.  The great Colorado river - which now provides fresh water for 30 million people - runs 130 feet lower than it once did in some areas.  And while, for millions of years, the Colorado poured its water into the Gulf of California, those days are passed.  Since 1998, the Colorado - like hundreds of rivers around the world now - has simply dwindled into a trickle of water and then nothing but dry caked earth that was once a river bed.

Fresh water depletion may be the most overlooked environmental and natural resource challenge the planet faces.  70% of fresh water is used to grow food.  Without that water, agriculture simply doesn't happen.

Yet there may be solutions.  While we're exhausting the easily available fresh water in lakes, rivers, and aquifers, there's a far vaster reservoir of water all around us - the salt water in the oceans.  The water in those oceans is thousands of times more than humanity uses in a given year.  For all effects and purposes, ocean water is a nearly unlimited supply, if we're clever enough and innovate enough to make use of it efficiently.

Desalinating salt water has historically been an environmental nightmare of its own.  The process dates back to the ancient Greeks and was largely unchanged from their time until the 1960s: boil water, capture the steam, and let it condense once again into fresh water.  That process is incredibly energy intensive, making it both expensive and - since most energy has come from fossil fuels - a source of carbon dioxide emissions.

But that has changed.  In the 1970s, researchers took a new approach.  In an act of biomimicry, they designed desalination systems modeled after the membranes that surround all living cells.  Those membranes can allow water through while stopping salt.  The new technique - desalination through semi-permeable membranes - has been improved upon now for decades, and every improvement has increased the ease of desalinating water. A kilowatt hour of electricity can now desalinate around 150 gallons of water, roughly 10 times as much as it could in 1970.  And the improvements are continuing.

Even at today's efficiency, desalinated water is still significantly more expensive than water pumped from rivers and aquifers.  But if progress in desalination technology can be maintained, that will change over the next few decades.  Of course, while most of humanity lives near a body of water, not all of us do.  For areas that are deeply inland, desalination may not be an effective option.  That said, the same technologies that can efficiently desalinate salt water can also be used to filter and purify waste water, making it much easier to re-use water.

Fresh water access is a very real problem today.  But the limit isn't the amount of water on the planet.  It's our intelligence.  The planet is capable of providing tremendously more water than we need, if we're clever enough.  The potential is out there. If we can innovate fast enough in desalination technology, we can tap into it.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

By Ramez Naam
This is Part Two of a five-part series by Ramez Naam, Singularity University Adjunct Faculty, exploring the power of innovation to boost our access to energy, food, water, raw materials, and human population. All are based on his new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.

In Part One of this series I showed that we have access to a huge amount of energy from the sun, and that every passing year is allowing us to harness exponential more of that energy for the same cost.

Now let's turn to food.

Food is arguably the most critical resource a society has.  Past civilizational collapses, like those of the Maya, almost inevitably come back to a failure of food production.

Humanity produces more food today than ever before, but in recent years demand has risen faster than supply.  As a result, food prices have soared over the last 5 years to more than double their previous levels. This is even more worrisome because the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that we'll need to grow 70% more food by 2050 to keep up with demand.

Can we do it?

Yes. IF we innovate in food production fast enough.

Our Rising Food Production

We haven't been standing still in food production.  Over the last half century, the world has roughly tripled its food production.  Looking at grains, we've gone from less than 900 million tons of grain produced per year to more than 2.6 billion tons.

Figure 1 - The world has roughly tripled total food grown since 1961.

While pessimists in the 1960s (and far earlier) projected that food production couldn't possibly keep up with population growth, in fact, it has.  Food production has grown faster than population, so that we now produce around 25% more calories per person alive on the Earth than we did in the 1960s.

Yet we need to keep moving.   With population rising (more importantly) with people around the world shifting to less efficient meat- and dairy- heavy diets, we need to hit that 70% growth target by 2050.  Ideally we'd go beyond that level, creating a surplus and bringing good prices down.

The Limits of Food Production on Earth

How much food can the planet grow?  Farms are essentially solar power collectors, capturing the sun's energy in a chemical form, which we can then consume.  A typical acre of corn field in the US will produce perhaps 150 bushels of corn each year - quite a bit.  The calories in all that grain, however, represent less than 1/1000^th of the sunlight that falls on a typical acre of land in a year.   Farms are incredibly inefficient.  That's good news. It tells us that there's tremendous headroom to grow food production per acre before we're running into limits of available energy.

There are other limits, of course - water, nitrogen, phosphorous, and other nutrients in the soil all place limits on the amount of food that can be grown on an acre.  Looking at all of these, an International Food Policy Institute study (pdf link) concluded that the maximum practical amount of grain the world could grow on current farmland was 72 billion tons.

Given that today we grow only 2.6 billion tons, that suggests that the headroom is a factor of 27 times more food than the planet grows today - not a factor of 1000, by any means, but a number so large that it places no effective limit on our ability to feed the planet's population over the coming century.

Figure 2 - Total Total possible food production on current farmland is estimated at 72 billion tons, or roughly 27 times current global production of 2.6 billion tons.

Tapping Into the Potential

As with energy, the limit on our access to food is the not the true size of the natural resource.  The limit is our ingenuity. Can we be clever enough to continue to increase the amount of food the world grows?  Can we accelerate that pace to stay ahead of rising global demand?

There are no guarantees, but I believe we can.  Today, crop yields per acre in the US and Europe are already double the yields of the world as a whole. Put another way: we already know we can double total world food production by applying rich-country methods - mechanized farm equipment, irrigation, and synthetic fertilizer.  That takes capital.  Yet as the developing world grows richer, those funds become more and more available.

There are also developments in biotechnology on the horizon that look extremely promising as ways to increase yields even where heavy investments in farm equipment, fertilizer, and irrigation aren't possible.  One of the most exciting is the C4 rice project.  Rice (and wheat and most other grains) use a type of photosynthesis called C3 to turn water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide into sugars we can eat. Corn and sugarcane use a more recently evolved type of photosynthesis called C4.  As a result, corn fields yield around 70% more calories than comparably sized rice and wheat fields.  They also need less water and less fertilizer.  The C4 rice project aims to create an upgraded form of rice that uses C4 photosynthesis, and thus grows more food, with less water and fertilizer. A similar project is doing the same for wheat.

Yet another project is taking the ability of legumes (peas and soy, for example) to fertilize themselves by extracting nitrogen from the air, and attempting to engineer that capability into cereal crops such as corn, wheat, and rice. As with the C4 project, that would be a tremendous boon to poor farmers in the developing world who can't easily afford fertilizer, and would raise crop yields in the poorest parts of the world especially.

The planet is capable of growing tremendously more food than we need.  The potential is out there. If we can raise global wealth fast enough, and if we can innovate fast enough in food biotechnology, we can tap into it.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

By Paul Sonnier
Paul is Head of Digital Health Strategy at specialty consulting firm Popper and Company, Founder of the 16,000+ member Digital Health group on LinkedIn, a Mentor at digital health startup accelerator Blueprint Health, and a Judge for the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE.

Over the past several years I've witnessed the digital revolution's long overdue transformation of health and medicine. During this time, the emergence of many innovative sensor-based health solutions has been particularly noteworthy: from iPhone-connected glucose meters and wireless ECG heart monitors, to fertility prediction solutions, to wearable fitness activity trackers, to mobile eye exams using a smartphone's camera. Surprisingly, while many of these innovations are unique and will have a positive impact on our health and the delivery of healthcare, most are not based on new sensor technologies, but leverage existing sensors in novel new ways. Yet, there are certain moon-shots that exist as amazing opportunities in the health sensing realm. For example, a non-invasive glucose monitor would allow diabetics to continuously track their blood sugar levels as opposed to doing sporadic blood tests or, as opposed to what is now possible but more invasive, doing so continuously via the use of a subcutaneous needle-based sensor.

All of this progress is sorely needed, no pun intended, as we see the imperatives of ever-rising healthcare costs and more chronic disease in the United States and abroad. Innovative sensors and devices will enable the transformation of our healthcare systems to a more consumer-centric model, where medicine moves away from episodic treatment delivered in centralized hospitals, to a patient-centered medical home where prevention, early intervention, and better chronic disease and acute medical condition management are the norm, not the exceptions. This new paradigm is reliant upon the ability to monitor and measure biometric data using sensors and devices that provide individuals with information on their own health status as well as feeding this important health data to their care delivery team.

A scenario that comes to mind is one where a person at elevated risk of heart disease (determined by genomic profile and/or physical and lifestyle condition) has a sensor implanted in the tip of their finger. This sensor would detect biomarkers that presage an impending heart attack. A sensor on the skin could pick up this signal and send it to the patient's smartphone, which will have an app that alerts them and others to the situation. They might then be additionally monitored in real-time for a heart attack while concomitantly modifying behaviors to lessen the risk. If they then have a heart attack, this might be detected in real time so that assistance can be dispatched immediately. Upon release from the hospital, the patient would continue to be monitored with sensors and, ideally, undertake additional behavioral and lifestyle modifications to prevent recurrence.

It's within this amazing new medical and consumer digital health context, and in light of the magnitude of the healthcare problems to be solved and the challenges faced in developing and bringing new sensor technologies to market, that I was delighted to be present when the XPRIZE's Peter Diamandis and Nokia's chief technology officer, Henry Tirri, announced the $2.25 million Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE at the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance's 2012 Convergence Summit in San Diego, CA. The overarching goal of the competition is to transform personal health with sensing.

Fast forward to the present day, and I find myself as one of the judges for the competition. This is incredibly exciting, as my hope is to add to the efforts of my fellow judges, XPRIZE, and Nokia in achieving the objectives of the Challenge. I can't overstate the importance to all of us in accelerating the availability of hardware sensors and software sensing technology that individuals and healthcare providers alike can use to access, understand, and improve our health and well-being.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

By Ramez Naam
This is Part One of a five-part series by Ramez Naam, Singularity University Adjunct Faculty, exploring the power of innovation to boost our access to energy, food, water, raw materials, and human population. All are based on his new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.

We have access to nearly unlimited energy, food, water, and raw materials. Over the next 5 days, I'll demonstrate that with numbers.

This is not to say that we don't have problems or threats ahead. We live on a finite planet with real problems facing it. Over the last few years, the prices of oil, food, metals, and raw materials of all sorts have shot up. Fresh water aquifers and rivers are being drained at a ferocious rate. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from our use of energy are heating up the planet. Over the next few decades human population will rise by another 2 billion and demand for water, food, and energy will rise by 50%, 70%, and 100%, respectively. Some look at these numbers and conclude that we're headed for a sharp crash, or at least that we're at the limits of the human population and human prosperity that the planet can bear.

But the planetary limits aren't even close. The only real limit, indeed, is the speed with which we can innovate. That is the critical variable to our future prosperity.

Energy

Humanity consumes energy at a rate of roughly 17 Terawatts - that is to say, 17 trillion joules per second, every second of every day. That's a huge number. But the sun hits the planet with nearly 90,000 Terawatts of power - 90 quadrillion joules per second - or more than 5,000 times as much energy as we use from all current sources of energy combined.

So energy on this planet is abundant. The primary problem isn't a limit on the amount of energy we can tap into. It's that we're primarily tapped into the far smaller far dirtier supply of energy from fossil fuels.

Much of that is because solar energy, until recently, has been prohibitively expensive. But that's changed rapidly through exponential improvements in solar photovoltaics. I've written before on the exponentially dropping price of solar power(as have many others). But let's look at this another way. For $100, how much solar power generating capacity can you buy?

The change is stunning. In 1980, $100 would buy you 5 watts of solar generating capacity. At the end of 2012, the same amount of money would buy you 100 watts of solar generating capacity, or 20 times as much.

Solar is now at the price where in sunny areas it is roughly the same price as grid electricity from coal or natural gas. If this pace continues, in the very near future solar will be far cheaper than any other sort of energy, allowing individuals and businesses to tap into many times more energy than they do today, at a lower cost, with no greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, we also need to store energy for use at night time. That also shows an exponential trend. Looking at just one technology - lithium-ion batteries - we see that the amount of energy that could be stored for $100 went up by a factor of 10 in just 15 years, from 1991 to 2005.

In short, the planet provides us with a tremendous amount of energy - far more than we will need for centuries to come. IF we can maintain - or even accelerate - our pace of innovation in energy technology, we'll be able to tap into this wealth of energy.

The challenge isn't the limit of energy - it's a race between the rate at which we damage our climate and the rate at which we can innovate.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

This week at XPRIZE's Visioneering 2013, 120 of the world's visionary thinkers will gather for three days to discuss the world's grand challenges, and how we might solve them using incentive competitions. The event itself is extremely inspiring and a lot of fun, attracting an incredible 'who's who' from the philanthropic, corporate and entrepreneurial world. Past attendees range from Larry Page and Sir Richard Branson to James Cameron, Quincy Jones, and Paul Allen.

Visioneering is a standard format. We typically pick five to ten "themed grand challenge areas," and our group of attending philanthropists, CEOs and government leaders focus on discussing the associated problems and market failures and then design Prizes to try and address them. Over the three-day Visioneering weekend the participants will develop dozens of Prize concepts, and then in a competitive head-to-head showdown that resembles a cross between TED and American Idol, the prize concepts are winnowed down to five finalists. In 2012, these are the five ideas that made it to the finals:

1. Empowering the Unpowered (affordable, on-demand rural energy)
2. Sydney By Lunch (high-speed, low-carbon travel from New York to Sydney in less than two hours)
3. Brain Dashboard (non-invasive, affordable brain health monitor)
4. Ed-U-Phone (achieving literacy on a mass scale, sustainably, by tapping into the universal desire for mobile technology)
5. Motion of the Ocean (portable, affordable desalination device powered by wave and tidal energy)

Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision, and his team received the top honors for "Ed-U-Phone." That prize idea ultimately led to the creation of the Global Literacy XPRIZE, which is currently in development, and which we hope will revolutionize global literacy and change what people think is possible regarding the means and methods used to learn.

A number of today's funded and launched XPRIZEs were born from past Visioneering sessions. Two concepts, AI Physician and Lab-on-a-Chip, conceived during a session in 2010, led to the funding and launch of the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE.

For Visioneering 2013 we have chosen eight topics that go beyond the XPRIZE's established interests in space, oceans and health. The critically-important new subjects we will tackle are:

1. Aging: How do we prepare for an expanding older population?
2. Behavior: How can we incentivize people to stop doing things that are bad for them or for society?
3. Happiness: How can we live happier, safer lives?
4. Infrastructure: How can we rebuild strong, innovative, resilient public and private infrastructure, physical and virtual?
5. Learning: How can we educate and train students of all ages to prepare them for 21st century jobs?
6. Mobility: How will we move ourselves and our information in the future?
7. Security: How can we protect our communities, our businesses, and our nations?
8. Women: How do we engage the power of women and girls in communities around the world?

What idea will win this year? Be sure to follow the action on Twitter at #Visioneering starting around April 25 on through the weekend, and visit xprize.org/visioneering to learn the results of the competition. Together with a clear vision of the future, we can solve the world's grand challenges and create a world of abundance.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

By George Skidmore, Ph.D.
George Skidmore, Ph.D. is a physicist working in micro machines and nanotechnology. He is Principal Scientist at DRS Technologies. He is also Nanotechnology Track Faculty at Singularity University.

Computer chips and silicon micromachines are ready for your body. It's time to decide how you'll take them: implantable, ingestible, or intimate contact. Every flavor now exists. Some have FDA approval and some are seeking it. Others are moving quickly out of the research lab stage. With the round one Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE entries due in one year, we're soon to see a heavy dose of sensors tied to the mobile wireless health revolution. With these sensors comes a heavy dose of information about your health, data about what medication you are taking and when you took it. The sensors are available to protect your health, but choosing how to use them and how to protect the privacy of your data will be a matter of personal responsibility.

Implantable sensors exist for a number of applications, having been used in animals for pet identification for many years. Other examples under development or seeking FDA approval are glucose detection for control of diabetes, blood pressure monitoring in people with recent cardiac arrest or risk of heart disease, and blood health. The most recently announced is implanted into animal brains with the long-term goal of enabling humans with paralysis to control machines with their minds. These implantable sensors have this in common: they self-contain what is needed to transmit information from inside your body without batteries and without wires. These are already shown to work; several are now seeking FDA approval. From the perspective of a patient, this is a Tricorder device, albeit one centered on an implantable micromachine sensor. If you or your doctor feel your health is at risk, I suspect you'd accept these inside your body. If your health feels not at risk however, this could be too invasive for your liking, and we'll offer you something one level easier to accept.

Ingestible sensor chips are an idea a little easier for most people to swallow. Here are three examples. Camera pills, which pass through your digestive tract taking pictures and transmitting them out are available from Given Imaging. Available to your doctor, that is. You may have seen the commercials. But two other swallowable sensors are now on the scene. You can find the Internet movies of Lance Armstrong downing the CorTemp thermometer pill from HQInc. This pill travels through your digestive tract wirelessly transmitting your core body temperature. Useful for athletes today, and for those with occupational exposure to high temperatures. Again, this mimics a singly-capable Tricorder device where hand-held electronics receive wireless signals about the temperature inside your body. A third ingestible, a wireless sensor pill from Proteus Digital Health does something simple, but vitally important: it reports that you've swallowed it. This first offering from Proteus is a placebo, with silicon computer chip attached. This pill, coupled to a wearable patch, which is coupled to a smart phone has been discussed in an article here at Forbes/Singularity previously. When the pill hits your stomach, it transmits to your phone that you took the pill. Your phone then does whatever you would like with the data; informs your doctor, or informs a trustworthy caregiver. If Proteus is right, and these sensors become commonplace, exponential growth in digital medicine for compliance monitoring will require as much silicon wafer manufacturing as all computer chips use today. And your phone will be filled with information about when you took your medication.

Many others are fortunate to be on no medication, don't feel their health is at risk, and have little need for the wireless health options mentioned so far. And many remain leery of what appears invasive, hackable, and scary about implantables and ingestibles. Our next level of comfort comes with intimate contact sensors, a wireless health option which will soon break out of the research labs. Two scientific papers of note showed the possibility of stick-on tattoo devices: John Rogers and colleagues at Illinois show several demonstration videos of these epidermal electronics; followed by UC San Diego's sweat pH (acidity) measurement geared towards athletes. The idea of sensors which simply contact the body is too good not to grow exponentially, and to be the leading path to winning the QTXP (acronym for Qualcomm Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize). After all, the Tricorder doesn't require micromachine implants or digital pills (as far as we know). Traditional medical apparatus which contacts the skin are accepted by most people without question. Two companies pursuing the QTXP, Scanadu and Medsensation, are publicly showing their approaches based on body contact. With over 200 competitors, expect to see many variants of wireless implantables, ingestibles, and intimate body contact sensor ideas introduced in the coming year.

Visit XPRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

<By Timothy W. Coleman
Timothy W. Coleman is a DC-based writer and security analyst who has co-founded two technology startup firms. He attended Singularity University's Graduate Studies Program at NASA Ames Research Center and has a Masters of Public and International Affairs in Security and Intelligence Studies and a Masters of Business Administration in Finance.

Kevin Mitnick was once known as the 'World's Most Wanted' social engineer and computer hacker. One doesn't acquire a title like that - nor an accompanying prison sentence - for vanilla exploits. While in Federal custody, authorities even placed Mitnick in solitary confinement; reportedly, he was deemed so dangerous that if allowed access to a telephone he could start a nuclear war by just whistling into it.

From the 1970s up until his last arrest in 1995 Kevin Mitnick skillfully eluded and bypassed corporate security safeguards, penetrating some of the most well-guarded systems, including, amongst countless others, the likes of Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Motorola, Netcom, and Nokia. He has even had to go on record and deny hacking into the Department of Defense's North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and wiretapping the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

At a recent app-enabled cloud network performance and security briefing hosted by Citrix and Palo Alto Networks in Washington, DC, Mitnick opened up about his former life and introduced himself to the Washington crowd accordingly.

"I assume there are a lot of Federal agencies here so we may know each other from a past life," Mitnick said in a devious, yet still tempered tone.

With the bylines of "Most Wanted" and "Infamous" and a laundry list of corporate names etched onto his belt of exploits, it'd be fair to assume that Mitnick's hacking masterpiece evolved from one of his more high profile penetrations. That assumption, however, couldn't be further from the truth.

Actually, the seminal stunt of his hacking career is much more puerile but nonetheless humorous. As Mitnick explained, "My favorite hack was actually when I was a kid."

Mitnick hacked the frequency of a local McDonald's drive-through ordering system and took control over the drive-through speaker, relishing the consequential bewilderment of unsuspecting McDonald's employees.

"I would sit across the street from McDonald's and I would take their order and tell them they were the 50th customer so your order is free. Please drive through your order is free," Mitnick reminisced. "People would drive up to the window and I would say, 'Our weight detection system detected your car is a little heavy so we recommend the salad instead of the Big Mac'."

"It got to the point that the manager of the McDonald's was wondering what the heck was going on and he walked outside and looked in the cars and around the parking lot, but he could not see anything because I was across the street. He even walked up to the drive-through speaker and looked at it and then stuck his head inside to see if there was actually someone inside and I yelled, 'What are you looking at?!'"

Mitnick didn't only revel in the joy of trolling individual customer orders, though. He went on to explain, "But my favorite was when the police drove up and I would say, 'Hide the cocaine, hide the cocaine!'" Alas, the theater of the ensuing build-up and moment when the unsuspecting employee met the suspicious glances of the police would befit any comedic late night show.

McDonald's, when reached for comment, was less than amused by Mitnick's claims. As all Fortune 500 companies take hacking very seriously, Danya Proud, Director of Media Relations, McDonald's USA stated, "We are not aware of this matter; however, security of our business, information and systems remains a top priority."

No word yet if McDonald's plans to hire Mitnick to consult on the protection of the integrity of their drive-through ordering process. One can only hope that measures to counter such nefarious hacks have been implemented.

At any length, look across the street if you ever encounter a problem during a wee-hours drive-thru run to Mickey D's. The world's once most wanted and infamous Mitnick may be enjoying a little bit of reflective levity at your expense, especially if you're the 50th customer.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

In this blog, I'm continuing my conversation with Jay Rogers, CEO and co-founder of Local Motors, the open-source automotive design company. Here, Jay shares how he builds and engages his 30,000-person crowd.

As I've conducted my interviews with crowdsourcing entrepreneurs and experts, it's constantly hit me that your ability to do something big and bold is really a function of the size and quality of your crowd. The questions I'm always fascinated to ask successful crowd-related CEOs are: "How did you do it? How did you recruit, build and engage your crowd?"

In this blog I'll share five specific ways that Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers found to build and engage his crowd of innovative automotive designers.

To recap, Local Motors is a crowdsourced car-design platform that also allows the micro-manufacturing of cars by its members. Local Motors built a community of people who are versed in every critical aspect of engineering: the interior design, the exterior design, the suspension system, and so on. Here are the five ways in which Jay Rogers and his team built their online community.

1. Create a bold dream that allows for creativity, with a measure of supervision: "Management of open source is definitely a guided endeavor," Jay said. In its early days, Local Motors very closely managed its forum of roughly 1,000 people who were contributing designs. "Basically, whatever was being discussed on our forums was being communicated to the entire membership," Jay said. "However, for it to work, we had to run it as a benevolent tyranny, or benign dictatorship. The reason I say that is that we ultimately had to make a decision about which car we were going to design and produce," he said. Ultimately Jay couldn't allow the discussion to go on forever or diverge in a multitude of directions. As the benign dictator he had to step in and "make the decision that we would take the most-liked designs from the community and produce that car."
2. Embrace failure. Use it to improve your process: According to Jay, "Failure is as important, or perhaps even more important, than success. Small-scale manufacturing means fail early, fail often. Crowdsourcing means fail early, fail often," he continued. "The important thing is to get something created, see where it breaks, and then fix it. I tell people to build it for manufacture, see if people like it and then if they don't, we can change it." "We've even had failure in how we created our competitions," Jay reflected. "At first Local Motors thought it would attract its teams by approaching design schools. It failed miserably. We had a lot of legal wrangling over design ownership and licensing. So we backed off from that, and found another way."
3. Use evangelism to create interest in the site. Evangelism is creating enthusiasm among your crowd so that they are eager not only to work with you, but also to tell others about what you do to help build your community. To help create early interest in its platform, Local Motors staff visited sites frequented by designers. "We'd simply say, 'We're going to make a car that you guys design. What do you think?' The important thing is to plant the flag," Jay said, "and tell people what you're going to do. Give a vision and say, 'You're going to make a vehicle on Local Motors and it's going to be awesome, you're going to love it and we're going to be honored to make it.' That was the first community evangelism that we did."
4. Move people through passion: Passion gets an entrepreneur through the startup days and the enormous efforts it takes to build a business. "If you start with passion, all of the hard days are easier to deal with," Jay said. "You don't know if your idea is going to work, but you just have to stay true to what you wanted to do at the beginning. Getting through the hard times is what you need the passion for and organizing your community is what you need passion for. You have to foster and develop the community and you need passion in order to be able to do that," he said.
5. Leadership, Organization, Respect and Engagement -- the 4 Key Parameters: Jay told me, "When I'm building a community, I focus on four key organizing principles: Leadership, Organization, Respect and Engagement or LORE." He outlined them:

• Leadership. This is a bold vision for the community. "Creating a vision is a form of leadership," Jay said. "To lead means to have a vision," which can encompass everything from what your cars should look like to the way the factories are going to be run.
• Organizing. This means creating a very defined, constrained box within which the community can operate and design. "Most people create better in a box," Jay said. "We had to set the box for the right conditions for successful micro-manufacturing." The Local Motors team learned the importance of creating parameters for engineers and designers. Early on, Jay remembered, "We learned two things: First, every engineer we interviewed said, 'Tell me the parameters of what I'm designing.' Second, everybody in a design school never asked those questions, but said, 'I've some great ideas.' They were more free-flowing with their great ideas and willing to share them under the right conditions."
• Respect. Respect is about managing that community and keeping people's name on their ideas and on what they create. "You're respecting their work," Jay said. "Your ability to be able to post your work and keep it as your own is critical to the fostering of such a community. Respect is also managing that community actively through the process."
• Engagement. This is about speaking honestly and openly to the community. "We don't pay money to make people come to do what we do," Jay recounted. "Yes, we need money, such as competition prizes, in order to be able to make them do things. But the most important thing is to actually talk with them. That's what engagement means: Instead of paying you, I'm going to pay you with my time and I'm going to pay you with my building of what you design."

In my next blog, I'm going to continue my conversation with Jay Rogers, and how he manages the competition and design initiatives at Local Motors, plus what's ahead for the site.

By George Skidmore, Ph.D.
George Skidmore, Ph.D. is a Physicist working in micro machines and nanotechnology. He is Principal Scientist at DRS Technologies. He is also Nanotechnology Track Faculty at Singularity University.

Small machines are ubiquitous. They've proliferated exponentially for forty years and are now all around us. Since new technology can be scary, especially small machine technologies that human eyes can't see, I'm writing to tell their story. They've been here protecting us, we use them for fun and games; and we expect them to have a continued bright future. From their beginning as air bag collisions sensors for protecting, to smartphone motion games they're moving into health and activity monitors. They've recently become a $10B market across their myriad uses.

The first small machine most of us knew was here to protect us from a specific kind of accident. This machine is a collision sensor, which knew in a split second to activate your automobile air bag and cushion the impact of your collision with the inside of the car. But small machines have proliferated since then. They are still in your automobile, doing the collision sensing for air bag deployment and several other things. But they are now capable of more subtle motion sensing. So we should be clear about what they are and what they do. Because there are going to be more of them, perhaps a great many more of them coming onto the scene. They are repeating their history with more ways to protect us, and are getting more fun. But let's learn what they are first.

Alongside the development of silicon computer chips (integrated circuits to many of us) there was a companion revolution. It happened right alongside, but with much less fanfare. Silicon isn't just a wonder material for building electronic circuits, it's a pretty good mechanical material too. While most people are familiar with Moore's Law and its consequences for more and better digital computing: personal computers, cell phones, tablets. You should become familiar with the companion revolution in the mechanical uses of silicon. There isn't a separate law for micro machine, there is just a borrowing of Moore's Law and its application to micro machine sensors and actuators.

Let us define micro machine as a small machine built using integrated circuit technology. This is our working definition where small indicates that is has features too small for the unaided human eye to see. This definition best encompasses what micro machines are and why they're important. Researchers in the field use the acronym MEMS, for micro-electro-mechanical systems. This is perfectly adequate for what micro machines are. But it misses why they are proliferating. They are not proliferating because they are small, they are proliferating because they can borrow an existing manufacturing infrastructure. They can catch a ride on the train that is Moore's law for proliferating digital computing. They can borrow the materials, manufacturing tools, knowledge, people, and markets to expand the utility of silicon chips. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors agrees with their importance and now includes them under the banner of "More than Moore". Which fits our definition well - build something more than computers in a silicon chip and extend this manufacturing infrastructure to be more than Moore's law. Small machines do this by borrowing all the attributes of silicon chip making and applying them to the mechanical world.

And proliferation of this technology has been big, let's constrain our discussion to motion sensing and see how it has grown exponentially. The original micro machine motion sensor, technically known as an accelerometer, was introduced for air-bag deployment in 1991. Today motion sensing has progressed to being three-axes of acceleration, and three axis of rotation (technically called gyroscopes). If you own a modern smart phone, you are aware that tilting or shaking it causes it to respond. It is sensing all that motion using small machines. The first mass-consumer use of motion sensing came twelve years later in 2006, and was entirely for fun and games, in the Wii remote controller from Nintendo. Video bowling, tennis, and others provided many hours of entertainment and activity in homes. The trend continued when motion sensors were introduced by Apple into the iPhone, combined with smartphones and tablets, this has brought motion games to near a billion people. And just recently bringing MEMS annual revenue at STMicroelectronics to over $1B.

But what comes next? Following its own history, there's more product introductions for fun and games. Backyard and junior athletes should check out Infomotion (www.infomotionsports.com) who is bringing athletic motion sensing into the real world. They are embedding a basketball with motion sensing. It records the motion of the ball to help an aspiring athlete objectively make the perfect shot everytime. Basketballs are just the start: they are promising soccer, volleyball, hockey, and football next. If you're more interested in your own body motion during sports, you can wear an instrumented suit from XSENS (www.xsens.com) and be training like an Olympic athlete.

But how are motion sensors proliferating to protecting us. At the intersection of sports and protection is Ridell, who is now selling football helmets instrumented with motion sensors to monitor, record, and lessen the deleterious effects of repeated collisions to the head. This will protect athletes of all ages.

I am now protecting my health with motion sensors. I'm wearing one of many available motion sensors which count steps and climbed stairs during my regular work day at the office, and during my work out runs. These are available from a number of companies in a number of form factors: on a belt clip or in the pocket from Fitbit and Withings, armbands from BodyBugg, and even Google has jumped in with a pair of shoes. Please note these are activity sensors for now. Real healthcare will take more time, including FDA approval. But micro machines have more to offer: pressure, chemical, gas , radiation, and heat sensors; if its worth sensing, someone is thinking about how to sense it with a small machine. And if it can be built small, using an integrated circuit process, it can be made cheaply and scaled to quantities of millions. It's a compelling way to make small machines, which is why you're about to have many more of them, whether you see them coming or not.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

By Vivek Wadhwa
Vice President of Academics and Innovation, Singularity University.

Visit any company in the Valley, and you'll see that it resembles the United Nations.  At the Google cafeteria, they always serve Indian, Chinese, and Mexican food; hamburgers and hotdogs are nowhere to be found.  Indeed, my research team documented that 52% of startups in Silicon Valley during the recent tech boom were founded by immigrants--like me.  So I used to call Silicon Valley the world's greatest meritocracy.

This was before I moved to the Valley and my wife pointed out something strange: that practically all of the people at Silicon Valley's big networking events were male.  They were mostly white, Indian, or Chinese.  Women, blacks, and Hispanics were nowhere to be found.  When I analyzed company founder data from the Kauffman Foundation, I was shocked to learn that only 3% of the tech firms were founded by women.  When I looked at the executive teams of the Valley's top tech firms, with a couple of notable exceptions, I couldn't find any women technology heads.  Even the management team of Apple didn't have a single woman in it.  And I learned that virtually all of Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are male dominated--the few women whom you find there are in either marketing or human resources.  Indeed, of the 89 VCs on the 2009 TheFunded list of top VCs, only one was a woman.

So I was wrong; this is no meritocracy.

Since then, I have researched this topic in greater depth.  When I analyzed data from my own studies on entrepreneurship, I was surprised to learn that there is virtually no difference in motivation between men and women entrepreneurs.  Women start companies for the same reasons as men: because they want to build wealth and capitalize on business ideas; like the startup-company culture; and are tired of working for others.  Women entrepreneurs are as highly educated as their male counterparts, have the same early interest in starting their own business, and learn the same valuable lessons from their work experience and from prior successes and failures.

This raised the question:  are women less competent as entrepreneurs than men are?  Are they not cut out for the rough-and-tumble world of entrepreneurship?  The answer turned out to be none of this.  An analysis performed by the Kauffman Foundation showed that women are more capital-efficient than men.  Babson's Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found  that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men.  Other research has shown that venture-backed companies run by women have annual revenues 12 percent higher than those by men and that organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management positions achieve a 35% higher return on equity and 34% higher total return to shareholders.

Could the education of women be the problem?  Not according to data from the National Science Foundation.  Girls now match boys in mathematical achievement.  In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men who do.  Women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor's and master's degrees, and nearly 50 percent of all doctorates.  Women's participation in business and MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to women is almost tenfold.

This shows that there isn't a fundamental problem, and that things are moving in the right direction.  I have also interviewed about 300 women in tech over the past three years, and my research team at Stanford University recently completed a survey of more than 500 women founders.  We are still analyzing the complex findings (and will likely publish a paper in summer).  At a glance, though, the new research shows a distinct change in attitudes over time.  Women are becoming more confident and assertive, and they are helping each other.  Men are also beginning to mentor and coach women.

That's not all.  Many technologies are now advancing exponentially.  We all know how computing is advancing--our computers get more powerful every year as prices drop.  The same is happening in fields such as robotics, AI, 3D printing, nanomaterials, medicine, and synthetic biology. This is making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve big problems.  Starting exponential companies requires relatively small amounts of money, and entrepreneurs with cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills have the advantage.  This plays to the strengths of women: they are in the catbird seat for the new era of innovation.

To encourage, inspire, and educate women to become engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs and help solve humanity's grand challenges, I am myself taking advantage of an exponential technology: crowdsourcing.  I plan to harness the genius of the crowd to produce a book about women at the frontier of technology.  Along with journalist and author Farai Chediya and my lead researcher Neesha Bapat, we are planning to ask hundreds--possibly thousands--of women to co-author this book with us.  We will presell the book on a crowdfunding site such as Indiegogo and donate all of the profits to fund the tuition of women through the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University and to support women-led startups coming out of this program.  This is a 10-week program designed for leaders who want to build innovative solutions to global grand challenges.

So Silicon Valley may not have been the perfect meritocracy, but there is hope that it will soon be, and that our women may save the world.

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This material published courtesy of Singularity University.

In this blog, I'm continuing my conversation with TopCoder founder Jack Hughes, who gives us the steps that TopCoder took to build its community.

In my previous two posts about the open-innovation platform TopCoder, I introduced you to its methods. Now I want to explore how TopCoder engages with its vast network across the globe.

"It's phenomenal what you get out of the community: how smart they are, how dedicated they are, how interested they are in either a client success or TopCoder success or each other's success," founder Jack Hughes told me. "They will be competing one minute and sharing notes about who won, then what's the next step. It's and incredible environment."

To recap briefly, TopCoder is the world's largest platform for digital open innovation, whose 445,000-plus members around the world compete to develop lines of code in return for prizes and recognition, resulting in great efficiencies of time and cost.

"Competition just happens to be the thing that first engaged our community," Jack said. "There are many other aspects to TopCoder in terms of collaboration, in terms of how we go about business models, in terms of what our future is and what we think is many social aspects to TopCoder. TopCoder is a big deal with our community not because of the money in it or even because of the sponsors that are out there, or the fact that they can find a job out of it. But because they want to get together, because of the physical place where they can get together," he said.

"The primary reason people hire us is not so much the money-saving, although it's important," Jack said. "What they're trying to do is shorten that cycle to get innovative processes done."

For TopCoder's community, the project is the attractive thing: solving something people can be proud of before their peers. "TopCoder takes a big thing, breaks into many pieces and then aligns all of the aspects that have to be designed - construction, analytics, quality assurance, review. That all happens through the community," Jack said.

"Some folks are really good at finding bugs and they'll come in and they'll just do that. Some folks are really good at fixing bugs; they'll come in and just do that. Some people are really good at software design and will do that. Some people want to learn how to do software design, so they'll come in. They might have been fixing bugs yesterday and today they want to learn software design, so they'll come in and start competing in that. Not so much for the money - they don't think they can win at first - but what they're going to get is tremendous amount of feedback about how well they do it," he said.

"Most of TopCoder's productive capability is not from people doing it full-time," Jack said, although a small segment works that way. "There is always a large segment that does it part-time. They're entrepreneurs in their own way. They're creating things for other people. They have a huge affinity for helping a startup or helping small business that are trying to figure out a way to connect better with customers and bring some ability to it. And now, they can do it at a price point that's reachable."

Jack outlined five steps that TopCoder used to build and engage its community:

1. Actively design and build the community, and start small. "The advice I would give," Jack said, "is that anyone who thinks that community is just going to find them and come to them is just wrong. You have to find and engage them."
2. 2. Go out to universities and spread the word. "In the beginning we were literally stuffing posters into round tubes, mailing them to schools and saying that we were running competitions," Jack said. "Those went to MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, all the usual. We then followed that up with actual visits to schools, where we would go into the school and hold the competition. The prizes would be beer and pizza. Doing that brought together cores of people who said, 'This is really cool and I want to keep doing it.' Then it went very viral, very quickly. We found that the university system was where people were most likely to talk about new things, new ideas, try new things, new ideas and it certainly worked in our case."
3. 3. Work with a partner to broaden your reach. Sun Microsystems sponsored TopCoder at one point and helped promote it. "Sun was looking at how we were attracting the community, and these were very highly skilled developers, the sort of everybody was looking for," Jack said. "Sun showed a way to get its product line into these folks' heads very early in their careers, whether they were going to go into a bank and do the analytics work or they were going to go and work for NASA and do engineering, whatever. Sun wanted to have that exposure to that group of people, even though it was relatively smaller at that time. I give Sun a lot of credit for doing that, for sort of going after that community as we had started the format."
4. 4. Encourage sharing, references and further participation. TopCoder created a member referral program, especially in large tournaments. "We would deviate the prize money so that if you referred a member who won, then you would get some sort of a tip for referring that member," Jack said. "For a time we had incentives, and TopCoder is all about incentive systems and motivation systems. But the referral system was one of the ones to make it even more viral then already it was."
5. 5. Be authentic to your vision, and always involve the community. "Communities are good in everything," Jack said. "They're good at solving a particular problem. They're also really good at sniffing out authenticity. So if you're unauthentic, you figure that out fast. Authenticity was one of the first things that we put up when we started the community. We set out saying that we intend to make money. We found just by saying that rather than being sly about it made a huge difference," Jack said.

"We're moving much more to a knowledge-based economy globally. We're moving to where the value content of the product or service is in its innovation capabilities, in its ability to help make its customer more competitive, faster, more efficient," Jack said. "That takes knowledge and knowledge is never going to be owned by anybody. You build knowledge not by direct financial capital as you did in appointment. It's by education, it's by teaching, it's by learning, it's by constantly moving yourself forward. Because of the Internet, people have access to those resources much more quickly. It starts to shift the weight back to individuals."

In my next blog, I'm going to continue exploring how Local Motors has revolutionized automotive design, through relying on the inspiration of the crowd.

NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

By Matt Hudson
Matt Hudson, PhD is a chemical engineer working for Shell Aviation Technology who recently interned at the X PRIZE Foundation through Shell Gamechanger.

I believe that innovation cannot be taught or forced from anyone. It must come naturally and does so as part of a certain lifestyle.

This became clear to me recently when I was given an opportunity to experience a work environment outside of my day-to-day routine and join the guys and gals at the X PRIZE Foundation offices in LA.

My normal day job is as a scientist for Shell's Aviation Technology team in Houston, Texas, which is by no means a run-of-the-mill boring job! I'm involved in a range of interesting projects and from day to day I can be working on aircraft engine oils and hydraulic fluids for high-tech jets to researching what makes the whitest, brightest smoke for stunt aircraft at air shows!

However, last year Shell's Gamechanger group offered up the prospect to work with the X PRIZE Foundation and I was lucky enough to be awarded this amazing opportunity. During my time at X PRIZE I saw innovation in a new light and I'd like to share this with you.

It first happened when I realized that just by being in the X PRIZE offices near Los Angeles, I felt I had more freedom to think. When presented with problems, I found it easier to find solutions I wouldn't normally consider. But why? The X PRIZE offices don't appear that much different from any other offices I've been in (although they do have some great models of spacecraft!).

The answer to my conundrum hit me one day in the large X PRIZE kitchen area.

The X PRIZE kitchen offers a vast choice of food for staffers, including candy and snacks, healthy foods, fruit and enough drinks to open a juice bar down on the beach! It's restocked weekly by the pallet-load, with new selections each time. Thus, whenever I visited the kitchen, I could try something new. And that was it: I realized that every day in that office was different from the one before. Not only were my food options different, so was my office location, my route to work (normally because I got lost on route from my hotel, but it still counts!) my co-workers, even our meetings, one of which was held outdoors by a fountain.

These things made my normal life at home in Houston--based on my own "comfort-zone" routines--seem rhythmic and monotonous. How many of you have your favorite breakfast food, or daily snack you just can't do without, or have almost the same thing every day for lunch? I realized that although my job is varied, my life style was not...

Get up
   Drive same route to work
     Attend same weekly meetings
        Coffee break at the same time
         Lunch - same place, same sandwich
           Drive home
             Workout
               Dinner
                 Bed
                   Repeat...

I realized that when I get into my comfort zone routine and go through the same cycle each day, it's hard to break out of the rhythm of doing everything straight down the line and only seeing one outcome for each problem; the one everyone else can also see as everyone's thinking along the same routine lines.

How can you expect to think 'outside of the box' if you are living inside a 'box'? If you are going to be truly innovative and think beyond standard ideas you need to break out of that cycle, lose the regularity, mix things up a bit and get your mind and body used to the unconventional, every day.

There are many opportunities for me to break out of my daily work cycle at Shell. These include Shell's Hunters Network, for example, a group I've joined that "hunts" new technologies and ideas (not deer!). I also help run Shell's Project Better World, a conservation and sustainable-development organization that deploys hundreds of employee volunteers around the globe annually to support exciting conservation projects.

A senior Shell leader had recently called with an opportunity to take part in Project Better World, a "hidden gem" of personal development. Now at first this seemed very strange to me... why would a manager recommend that his staff leave their jobs for two weeks to take part in research in rainforest soil erosion in Borneo! But now I understand and his view highlights my point: The experience puts people outside their comfort zones and allows them to develop new skills and explore their professional and personal limits. When they return to their jobs, they can apply what they've learned in ways that may not have occurred to them, and view projects from a new perspective.

To be sure, not everyone can embark on a life-changing expedition, eat a different lunch each day or even hold group meetings around a fountain. Still, in our typical 9-to-5 environments, why not try to break the monotony caused by the normal human condition that embraces the familiar?

How can you think outside the box if you live entirely inside a box? To be truly innovative and to think beyond standard solutions, it's necessary to break out of that cycle, lose the regularity, mix things up and get your mind and body used to the unconventional, every day. The question is, how do you inspire yourself and your team to leave that comfort zone and live for true innovation?

Visit X PRIZE at xprize.org, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and get our Newsletter to stay informed.

This blog post is brought to you by Shell, our Exploration Prize Group sponsor.