Yun Family Foundation Announces Million-Dollar Prize for Social Innovations

MENLO PARK, Calif., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Yun Family Foundation announces The Grand Challenge for Global Interdependence ("The Challenge"), an incentive competition designed to nurture innovations that promote a better future for all through inclusive stakeholding, vested interdependent interests, and goal congruence. The Challenge invites social innovations from any discipline including economics, politics, arts, technology, and sciences (including the social sciences).

The Challenge will proceed in three stages of competitions. The first stage of the competition will run from 2019 until 2021 and will consist of awards of $5,000 to each of the 20 winners. The second stage of the competition will be determined by the outcome of the first stage of the competition and will run from 2021 until 2023. The third stage of the competition, the Grand Challenge, will run from 2023 to 2026 and will award a $1,000,000 incentive prize to the winner.

The first stage of the competition will proceed as two separate one-year cycles starting mid-year 2019. Each year, 10 awards of $5,000 will be made, for a total of 20 awards over a two-year period. The second stage of the competition, which will be designed bottoms-up based on the outcome of the first stage, will fund the best proposals for creating pilot projects that implement the ideas from the first stage of the competition as well as new ideas.

The  $1,000,000 Grand Challenge is the third stage of the competition and will proceed over a three-year cycle. The parameters for the Grand Challenge will be determined based on the outcomes of the first and second stages of the competitions. The winner of The Grand Challenge will be announced on July 4th, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Applicant proposals will address questions such as:

• Indicate in one or two sentences the essence of your idea.
• Why is your idea an unconventional or creative approach to the problem outlined in the topic?
• In what ways does the existing system exhibit perverse incentives or misalignment of interests?
• In what ways does the proposed innovation reflect inclusive stakeholding (with specific attention paid to stakeholders who do not have a voice), alignment of interests, vested interdependent interests, and goal congruence?
• In what ways would the proposed innovation improve the well-being of individuals, immediate communities, and the global community?
• What are the potential risks, including outlier risks, of the proposed innovation?
• What is the implementation and distribution strategy for the innovation?

Participants are encouraged to think outside of the box and to challenge existing social norms and paradigms. Innovative ideas in any sphere of life will be considered.  For-profit and nonprofit ideas will both be considered. Some examples are:

• Projects in the field of education, such as a system in which students rewards their teachers, through smart contracts on the blockchain, with tokens of appreciation—in both senses of the word—ten years down the road.
• Projects in the field of biology, such as solutions that boost oxytocin levels in the whole population.
• Projects in the field of healthcare, such as a system in which health insurers are given a vested interest in their insured population's health savings ten years down the road through smart contracts that pay out tokens on the blockchain.
• Projects in the field of humanities and arts are eligible, such as a song with an embedded social message.

More details on the application process for the initial stage of the competition will be announced in the coming weeks.

For questions about The Grand Challenge for Global Interdependence, Yun Family Foundation, or for interview requests, please contact Paula Page at [email protected] or (650) 279-3881 or www.paulapagepr.com.

SOURCE Yun Family Foundation