💬 “When we are able to remove the lens of geography, culture, biases, economics, religion, or protectionism, we will see that others’ problems are universally the same as ours.” @Amir Banifatemi

This is a conversation with Amir Banifatemi

🎙️ Amir is the General Manager for Innovation and Growth at XPRIZE where he leads the AI initiatives and is Executive Director for the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE and the ANA Avatar XPRIZE.
Prior to joining XPRIZE, Amir began his career at the European Space Agency and then held executive positions at Airbus, AP-HP and the European Commission division for information society and media. He managed two venture capital funds and contributed to the formation of more than 10 startups with emphasis on Information Technologies, Telecommunications, IoT, and Healthcare. Mr. Banifatemi is a guest lecturer and an adjunct MBA professor at UC Berkeley, Chapman University, Claremont McKenna College, UC Irvine, and HEC Paris.

XPRIZE is a non-profit organization that designs and hosts public competitions intended to encourage technological development to benefit humanity. Their board of trustees include James Cameron, Larry Page, Arianna Huffington, and Ratan Tata among others.
The XPRIZE mission is to bring about "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity" through incentivized competition. It fosters high-profile competitions to motivate individuals, companies and organizations across all disciplines to develop innovative ideas and technologies that help solve the world's grand challenges.

The first XPRIZE foundation began in 1996 when entrepreneur Peter Diamandis offered a $10-million prize to the first privately financed team that could build and fly a three-passenger vehicle 100 kilometers into space twice within two weeks. The contest, later titled the Ansari XPRIZE for Suborbital Spaceflight, motivated 26 teams from seven nations to invest more than $100 million in pursuit of the $10 million purse. On October 4, 2004, the Ansari XPRIZE was won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures, who successfully completed the contest in their spacecraft SpaceShipOne.

This is the Infinite Leaders series on the Boundless Podcast, we are exploring how Digital Transformation, Data and Artificial Intelligence can promote, provide engagement and deliver environmental sustainability.

🎧 In this episode of the Infinite Leader series on the @Boundless Podcast, Amir talks about:
💡 1.) the exponential impact of grand challenges
💡 2.) the role of XPRIZE in galvanising coordinated action
💡 3.) why the prize money is a smaller factor than some people think
💡 4.) the importance of collaboration, even in competition
💡 5.) how the XPRIZE Foundation is contributing to addressing climate change