Application Case 11.3 XPRIZE Optimizes Visioneering XPRIZE is a nonprofit organization that allocates invited to create their own goals and solutions to a prizes via competitions to promote innovations that grand challenge. have the potential to change the world for the bet- ter. The main channel for designing prizes that solve humanity's grandest challenges is called Visioneer- The Problem ing. It attempts to harness the power of the global Every year, there is a meeting of 250 members of crowd to develop solutions to important challenges. "Visioneers Summit Ideation" where top experts The organization's major event is an annual summit (entrepreneurs, politicians, scientists, etc.), partici- meeting where prizes are designed and proposals are pate to discover and prioritize topics for the XPRIZE evaluated. The experts at XPRIZE develop concepts agenda. and turn them into incentivized competitions. Prizes Finding the top global problems can be a very are donated by leading corporations. complex challenge due to a large number of vari- For example, in 2018, IBM Watson donated a ables. In just a few days, top experts need to use $5 million prize called "Al approaches and collabora- their collective wisdom to agree on the next year's tion." The competition had 142 registered teams, and XPRIZE top challenges. The method used to support 62 were left in round 2 in June 2018. The teams are the group's decision is a critical success factor. (Continued)Application Case 11.3 (Continued) The Solution The Swarm Al replaced traditional voting meth- In the 2017 annual meeting for determining what ods by optimizing the detailed contribution of each challenge to use for 2018, the organization used the participant. swarm Al platform (from Unanimous AD. Several The Results small groups (swarms) moderated by Al algorithms were created to discover challenging topics. The mis- Use of swarm AI did the following: sion was to explore ideas and agree on preferred . Supported the generation of optimized answers solutions. The objective was to use the talents and and enabled fast buy-in from the participants. brainpower of the participants. . Enabled all participants to contribute. In other words, the objective was to use the . Provided a better voting system than in previ- thinking together feature of swarm Al to generate ous years. each group's synergy with the Al algorithms acting as moderators. This way, smarter decisions were QUESTIONS FOR CASE 11.3 generated by the groups than its individual par- 1. Why is the group discussion in this case complex? ticipants. The different groups examined six pre- 2. Why is getting a consensus when top experts are selected topics: energy and infrastructure, learning involved more difficult than when non-experts human potential, space and new frontiers, plant are involved? and environment, civil society, and health and well-being. The groups brainstormed the issues. 3. What was the contribution of swarm AP? Then, each participant created a customized evalu- 4. Compare simple voting to swarm AI voting ation table. The tables were combined and ana- "Sources Compiled from Unanimous Al (2018), xprize.org, and lyzed by algorithms. xprize.org/about