Launch the next big education startup. Enter the Lumina Prize!

Welcome to the Lumina Prize!

Big Think and Lumina Foundation are joining together to identify and help scale leading innovations in education after high school. We are looking to introduce social entrepreneurs with the most innovative solutions in post-high school education to the world. Winners will receive a free trip to New York to receive media training from Big Think’s producers and a team of social venture advisors. From there, your business pitch will be filmed as a real Big Think clip and shared with the world.

We are seeking the most innovative solutions to this challenge. Five semi-finalists will be chosen and posted on our website for our audience to vote. From those five, we will choose both a People’s Choice winner and an Experts Choice winner who will be flown to NYC for a BigThink interview. Please take the next 30 minutes to share some information about your breakthrough solution. Thank you for entering the contest!

To enter the Lumina Prize, head to https://bigthink.com/Lumina-Foundation/lumina-prize

- Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Its goal is to prepare people for informed citizenship and for success in a global economy.

- Jamie Merisotis is a globally recognized leader in philanthropy, education, and public policy. Since 2008, he has served as president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Merisotis is the author of the widely-acclaimed book America Needs Talent, named a Top 10 Business Book of 2016 by Booklist. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Washington Monthly, Politico, and other publications.

Transcript: Our model is really predicated on the idea that we need large-scale change. We need system change, not tinkering at the margins. We actually need to focus on a much broader model of learning and working. So in this model all learning should count. It shouldn't just be the kinds of learning that you get when you go to a traditional learning enterprise, a college or university.

Innovation is something that we've long talked about but today innovation is really critical to success in the system. We need innovation that actually focuses on two key objectives. The first one is time, that is the pace of change that's happening today requires innovation that is much more rapid than what we've seen in the past. So we need more like a rapid prototyping model of innovation than what we might have had in the past where you would do some experiments, do some innovation and then hope for some change.

The second important thing is scale. The nature of the change that's required is actually going to have to be at scale. In other words, the innovation actually has to be focused on the fact that it's going to serve a large number of people – that it's actually going to solve large-scale social problems. So innovation in the past and particularly philanthropic organizations trying to support innovation have often been focused on germinating new ideas with the hope that at some time these things will achieve scale. Today, we need to be focusing on innovation that is actually going to take place much more rapidly and is actually going to be focused, from the get-go, on scale.

Our objective in this work is quite simple. First, we want to work with entrepreneurs and discover the best ideas that are out there that might help us achieve this large-scale impact that we want to achieve. The second is to elevate those ideas through this partnership with Big Think in ways that will give them a platform, give them visibility. And the third is actually to work with the entrepreneurs to achieve the scale impact that's necessary. And so our model here is to help uncover, discover those big ideas, actually help to elevate them and then work with the entrepreneurs to achieve the scale that's needed...