XPrize India to reward those who think big and set crazy goals

Serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain, who has been focusing on mining the moon for resources with his commercial space company Moon Express, has his feet firmly on earth. As founder and CEO of four companies in Silicon Valley, US, Jain is excited about the next big breakthrough innovation that could come from India.

Along with Rata Tata, Chairman Emeritus, Tata Sons, Naveen Jain is the co-chair and trustee at XPrize India, an organisation that believes in incentivising social and technological development with cash prizes.

“If a poor immigrant from India can dream of and can actually go to the moon, it shows what any person can hope to achieve. Going to the moon for me, is a symbolic victory of human ingenuity,” said Jain, adding, “but it is presumptous of us to sit in the US and think we can understand India’s problems. We need to identify problems that impact the people of India from within India,” said Jain, speaking to BusinessLine at the launch of XPrize’s India chapter.

Moving beyond the US for the first time after a decade, XPrize plans to launch multiple prizes in India over the next few years. Focus areas will be water, waste management, energy, and food and nutrition.

Jain cited an anecdote about American philanthropists in Africa to illustrate his point about relevance. “They saw African women walking eight miles to fetch water. So, they dug a well right inside the village. The next day, the women poisoned the well. It turned out they didn’t mind the eight-mile walk. Actually, it was their time alone, away from their families, their problems. The women wanted some personal time,” he said. While Americans may think issues of poverty, drinking water and education in India need to be tackled, Jain said this may not necessarily be the case. “Here, people might say poverty is okay, but there are issues of corruption, of whether our daughters are safe...We would need people in India to define the problem. Once it is defined, entrepreneurs will try and solve the problem,” said Jain.

For the 55-year-old founder of Moon Express, which aims to land a robotic craft on the lunar surface in 2015, involvement with XPrize India is not just about paying it back to his motherland.

Jain insists that every prize amount announced globally paves the way for the birth of new areas of work, ensuring the spread of knowledge, showcasing the human spirit, and generating wealth.

Moon Express is, itself, one of a handful of teams competing for the $30-million Lunar XPrize. The competition is organised by the XPrize Foundation with sponsorship from Google, and will be awarded to the first team that lands a commercial spacecraft on the moon, travels 500 metres across its surface, and sends high definition images and video back to earth. As Jain said, space exploration and commercialisation are inspiring in themselves; but the more exciting challenge is understanding a local issue and delivering a solution.

Jain insists that truly disruptive endeavours “need to think big, have crazy goals and target large markets. That is exactly what XPrize India is aiming at, as ordinary people have the power to transform the trajectory of human development.”

Paresh Ghelani, Chairman, BPG Motors, an avid entrepreneur, has joined the XPrize India team, as has venture capitalist Asha Jadeja Motwani, who announced her participation by sponsoring a multi-million dollar prize to solve women-related issues in India.

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