How XPRIZE Is Fighting Adult Low Literacy: Q&A with Shlomy Kattan of the XPRIZE Foundation
XPRIZE is a nonprofit that aims to inspire people everywhere to create a more hopeful future. The Adult Literacy XPRIZE, which was launched in June 2015, aims to address economic inequality by improving access to basic education and literacy instruction for low-income and low-skilled adults.
What is XPRIZE?
XPRIZE’s mission is to help create a more hopeful future for humanity and the planet by inspiring people everywhere to solve the biggest challenges we face. While our work ranges from publishing Impact Roadmaps to running community impact programs, the most visible part of our work is the design and implementation of large-scale competitions to encourage technological innovation for social and environmental good.
In each XPRIZE competition, we offer participants a large financial reward for making a leap in technology. Over the past 25 years, we’ve launched 17 prizes with total prize purses of more than $155 million and have awarded 11 of those prizes. The first XPRIZE was $10 million, awarded in 2004 to Mojave Aerospace Ventures for technology that makes space travel safer and less expensive. We’ve since launched competitions across a variety of domains, including to improve access to basic healthcare, map the ocean floor, and bring educational tools to low-literacy adults.
How do you identify areas suitable for an XPRIZE competition?
On one level, the basic question we ask ourselves is what impact a competition will have. How many lives will it affect? What kind of positive change will it provoke? Will it address a challenge that matters, not just one that’s interesting?
Second, we need to make sure the timing is right. An XPRIZE is really good for accelerating the path from science to technology, where “science” is the basic research and “technology” is the productization of that research. So, we need to know that the competition is addressing a challenge where the science already exists, but the motivation or incentive to invest in and drive change is missing or poorly aligned. We accomplish this both through our Impact Roadmaps and our prize design process.
Finally, and related to this second point, we want to see that the solution isn’t imminent. If someone is set to achieve the breakthrough anyway in the next few years, or the problem simply isn’t big enough, then an XPRIZE frankly isn’t necessary.
I’ll use the Adult Literacy XPRIZE as an example. Thirty-six million adults in the United States and nearly 800 million around the world do not read at a third-grade level. That has tremendous economic and social impacts on communities. For example, 70 percent of the prison population in this country is low literate. Adult learners face a unique set of obstacles to improving their literacy skills. Brick-and-mortar classes are inconvenient, time consuming, and difficult to get to. Adult learners work, have families, and often lack rapid means of transportation.
Despite the fact that more than 80 percent of adult learners regularly use a smartphone, there was minimal investment in the public and private sector to develop digital tools that would allow low-literate adults to learn anytime and anywhere.
So, we challenged teams from around the world to create mobile learning solutions that would take an adult learner — that is, a person who lacked basic English literacy skills — and help that person achieve basic literacy in just one year. Doing that means outperforming classroom-based study.
An ideal XPRIZE competition encourages competitors to either improve upon an existing standard set by industry or government, or to create an impressive product or service in an area with massive unmet need.
How do you determine the design of a competition?
We do a significant amount of research, drawing insights from interviews with dozens of experts, entrepreneurs, technologists, and academics who are working on the topic. We hold what we call “visioneering workshops,” where we spend two days with between 20 and 30 of these experts to design the prize concept. Our Impact and Design team then really delves deep on how we can test the results. In the end, it’s an art based on science.
If you’re thinking about the prize purse — people often ask how we determine those — that is really related to a number of factors. Fundamentally, we want to target a 10X return on the prize purse in investment and spending by teams. So, for example, a $10 million prize should generate about $100 million in investment and spending by the teams competing for that prize. You don’t want the prize to be so large that it doesn’t generate the right amount of leverage, but you also don’t want it to be so small that it doesn’t end up generating enough attempts at a solution. We reflect on our past competitions and on how distant the target technology is from existing technology. The more distant the target, the larger the prize. If the target innovation requires only some tweaking of existing technology, the prize is smaller.
Is naming a winner the only measure of success of an XPRIZE competition? Are there other criteria you consider?
It’s great if we name a winner, because then we know that impressive technological change has occurred. However, we also want to see progress in the surrounding market and hope for market activity at a value that exceeds our prize purse many times over. We hope the XPRIZE serves as a catalyst for more private investments and strategic partnerships beyond the competition.
Furthermore, we eventually want the target innovation used commercially on a large scale. We want increased awareness of relevant issues and available solutions, but more directly, we want products and services resulting from the new innovation adopted widely.
Sometimes, once an innovation is developed and built, implementation at scale follows automatically, as the economic incentives are already in place. Other times, we need to design specific impact activities to maximize adoption. For example, for the Adult Literacy XPRIZE, we launched a communities competition to get organizations from around the United States to adopt the tools developed by the winning teams from the app development stage of the competition. Or we may promote adoption more informally by helping the prize winner form relationships with other appropriate companies or funders. In our past competition for technologies measuring ocean chemistry, we made sure that the prize winner was connected with relevant firms so they could scale and manage production efficiently.
Why did the XPRIZE Foundation choose adult literacy as the focus of a competition?
The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy and the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, both of whom came together to sponsor the competition, have been active funders in the adult literacy space for more than a quarter century. They approached us with a problem they thought would be a good candidate for an XPRIZE to help solve. The adult literacy rate in the United States had not changed in nearly 30 years, and investment in the space was really meek. As I said before, we’re talking about more than 36 million adults in the United States, but when you compare what we spend on adult basic education and English language instruction to, say, preschool education, it’s striking.
For example, in 2015, when we launched the competition at the federal and state levels, we were spending about $1.4 billion on adult learners, and that government spending accounts for approximately 90 percent of the spending on adult education in the country. By comparison, we were spending — at around the same time — something on the order of $7 billion at the federal level alone on Head Start, and preschool education is an area where, unlike adult education, you have significant private spending. There are 8 million preschool-aged children in the United States, so the per pupil investment at the governmental level is approximately 50X for preschool versus adults. As a result, only about 2 million adult learners were enrolling in classes, and more than 200,000 were on waiting lists. In that type of environment, you’re going to see very little progress.
As we did the research, we realized that a technological solution had the opportunity to both increase access to adult education while decreasing the costs. However, there was so little private investment that companies that were building educational tools would usually focus on other segments of the education pipeline. So, our first goal was to increase the number of digital learning tools available in the market, and our second goal was to get those into the hands of adult learners everywhere.
What influenced the design of the adult literacy XPRIZE competition? Have you learned anything about adult literacy since the competition began that would have affected the original design?
For the Adult Literacy XPRIZE, we took a novel approach to maximize scaling and distribution. The Grand Prize of $3 million was awarded to the developers of an app allowing the largest educational gains. There were also achievement prizes awarded for apps for English Language Learner students as well as students of English as a Second Language.
At the end of August, we’ll be wrapping up the communities competition, which awards another cash prize to the community organization that facilitates the most downloads and the greatest usage of the winning apps. While this competition is important, we’ll still use a variety of other marketing and distribution channels to encourage adoption of the apps.
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Learn more about Shlomy Kattan.
With writing help from Erin Fahrenkopf and Tim Phillips.
