History remembers Charles Lindberg, an early mail pilot, and his flight across the Atlantic however, what many people don’t know is that he was chasing a $25,000 prize offered by Raymond Orteig, a hotelier from New York.

Talent Identification

Starchitect Maya Lin was discovered as a young student when she won a public design competition for the Vietnam Memorial.

Two centuries before Lindberg, the Longitude Prize was offered by the British government to develop an accurate way to measure longitude out to sea. The winning solution came from an unlikely source – a local clockmaker – but his innovation remained the standard of navigation at sea until the invention of the GPS.

More recently, the Ansari X PRIZE to create a vehicle that could travel to an altitude of 100km twice in two weeks was won by an airplane developer named Burt Rutan, and has since resulted in the creation of a private spaceflight industry.

Shift Public Discourse

HopeLab's Ruckus Nation drew hundreds of entries from around the world to help inform the development of an innovative new product that gets kids moving.

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Mobilize the Masses

The DARPA Network Challenge provided keen insights into the roles that the Internet and social networking play in team formation as well as the "urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems."