Entrepreneurial philanthropist and office computer guy who does the thing to fix the WiFi, Bill Gates, is offering $100,000 of initial funding with the prospect of $1 million continued funding to whomever can successfully pitch to him the design for “the next generation of condoms.” The search for The World’s Next Top Prophylactic is on.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation identifies the following problems with condoms:
- “The primary drawback from the male perspective is that condoms decrease pleasure as compared to no condom.“
- “[Female condoms] suffer some of the same liabilities as male condoms, require proper insertion training and are substantially more expensive than their male counterparts.”
Therefore, your client brief, should you chose to accept it, is to design a prototype that increases sensation to encourage greater use, and thus prevent the rapidly rising transmission of sexually-transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies and HIV/AIDS, while also reducing the overall cost and increasing user-friendly qualities.
Easy, no?
Marking Criteria to Evaluate Success includes “a testable hypothesis, an associated plan for how the idea would be tested or validated and yield interpretable and unambiguous data.“
The challenge forms part of the Foundation’s ‘Grand Challenges Explorations‘ initiative, a program whose aim is to improve the quality of life for those living in the poorest parts of the world; those who don’t have loud speakers playing music underwater in their lap pools [by far the coolest rich person thing].
If you’ve got a game-changing idea to usher in a new era of contraception used by some estimated 750 million people worldwide you can submit your proposal to GrandChallenges.org.
via Mashable
Photo by Stan Honda via Getty
