In 2025, independent lab testing found that roughly 90% of the toothpastes it examined contained detectable lead. The brands implicated were not fringe products, including household names like Crest, Colgate, Sensodyne, and Tom’s of Maine, along with dozens of formulas marketed for children and many sold as “natural” or “green.”
That headline rattled a lot of medicine cabinets, and it deserves a careful look rather than a panic. Toothpaste is, after all, a cleaner we put in our mouths twice a day for a lifetime. Knowing what’s in it, what the science says about the risk, and which ingredients raise legitimate environmental and health questions is worth a few minutes. Here’s where the evidence stands now.
Toothpaste, a History
The history of oral hygiene dates back nearly 7,000 years to an abrasive powder made from materials like eggshells, pumice stone, or ox hoof ashes. Egyptians would wet the powder and rub it on their teeth. Later the Romans and Chinese sought to improve the flavor of their abrasive powders with herbal ingredients like mint and ginseng. Not much changed until the 1800s, when inventors added soap and chalk to the powder.
The first toothpaste tube, which was made of lead, was introduced in the 1890s. (Yes, lead has a long and unfortunate history with this product.) It was the first of many changes that followed in the 20th century, as a host of new chemicals both increased the effectiveness and the environmental and health risks of toothpaste. In 1955, Procter and Gamble released the first stannous fluoride cavity-preventing toothpaste. Fluoride remains the most common active ingredient in toothpaste today.
Personal care products of all kinds were largely homemade until the last century, and that is still an option today. You can make your own toothpaste and mouthwash at home using simple ingredients you already have in your kitchen. Talk to your dentist before giving up fluoride, though, which is proven to deter cavities.
The Heavy Metals Question
The 2025 lead findings came from Lead Safe Mama, a consumer-advocacy operation run by lead-poisoning-prevention activist Tamara Rubin. Its program crowdfunds samples and sends them to an independent, third-party lab. Across roughly 51 toothpastes and a few tooth powders, about 90% tested positive for lead, 65% for arsenic, just under half for mercury, and about a third for cadmium. All four are toxic; lead and arsenic are particularly concerning for children’s developing brains.
That sounds alarming, and the contamination is real. But context matters enormously here.
Where the metals come from
The contamination appears to be unintentional, traced to naturally sourced ingredients that carry trace metals when they aren’t purified: hydroxyapatite (often derived from animal bone or mineral sources), calcium carbonate (an abrasive), and especially bentonite clay, a natural “detoxifying” ingredient that was a recurring culprit in the highest-contamination products.
Rubin’s ingredient testing found the raw materials themselves were contaminated, which points to a supply-chain and sourcing problem rather than one or more bad actors.
The regulatory gap
None of the tested products exceeded the FDA’s federal limit for lead in toothpaste, which is 10,000 parts per billion (ppb) for fluoride-free pastes and 20,000 ppb for fluoride pastes. However, those thresholds are substantially higher than the limits set for food. By comparison, California caps lead in baby food at 6 ppb, and the proposed federal Baby Food Safety Act would set 10 ppb, neither of which covers toothpaste. Most tested pastes cleared the baby-food bar by a wide margin but sit far below the cosmetic ceiling.
Washington State has moved to close part of that gap. Its Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act set a 1,000 ppb lead limit for cosmetics, including toothpaste. A handful of products in the testing exceeded it, with the worst offender, a brand called Primal, containing 7,800 ppb. Companies have been given time to come into compliance.
What an independent risk assessment found
After the headlines, toxicologists reviewed the Lead Safe Mama results. A peer-reviewed screening-level risk assessment published in Public Health Toxicology in 2025 used Lead Safe Mama’s own data and deliberately conservative assumptions, including the worst-case scenario that a child swallows a full smear of toothpaste at every brushing. The conclusion: for cadmium and mercury, exposures fell below health-guidance values across the board. For lead and arsenic, on the other hand, a handful of products exceeded the most protective guidance levels under heavy-use scenarios, but the doses were still several times to several orders of magnitude lower than what children and adults already get from food, household dust, and soil.
The researchers’ assessment concluded that the heavy metals detected “are not anticipated to increase health risk” through typical use, and that a normal pea-sized amount is safe. That doesn’t make the contamination acceptable; no level of lead exposure is considered safe, and unnecessary exposure is still worth avoiding. But it reframes the story from “your toothpaste is poisoning you” to “your toothpaste is one more avoidable trace source in a world that has too many.”
A small set of products came back as free of all four metals, proving cleaner sourcing is achievable. They included Dr. Brown’s Baby Toothpaste, Spry Kids’ tooth gel, Orajel Training Toothpaste, and Miessence. (Earth911 will receive a small fee if you make a purchase through these links.) As of mid-2025, Lead Safe Mama listed seven products meeting its non-detect threshold.
Other Ingredients Worth Watching
Heavy metals aren’t the only thing in the tube that draws scrutiny. A few others come up repeatedly:
- Titanium dioxide. This white pigment (listed as CI 77891) does nothing for your teeth; it’s purely cosmetic, there to make the paste look bright white. The EU banned it as a food additive in 2022 over genotoxicity concerns, and the EU’s Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety has said a mutagenic effect from oral cosmetic use can’t be ruled out. It remains legal in toothpaste in both the EU and the US, and the FDA still permits it, but many manufacturers are dropping it voluntarily. Since it has no functional benefit, it’s an easy one to skip.
- Sulfates (SLS). Sodium lauryl sulfate, the foaming agent, is not linked to cancer despite a persistent internet rumor. It can be a skin and tissue irritant for sensitive people and has been associated with canker sores. SLS-free options are widely available if you’re prone to either.
- The sodium pyrophosphate used to prevent tartar can pass through wastewater treatment and feed algal blooms and create dead zones in waterways. Phosphates aren’t in every paste, and some mainstream brands offer phosphate-free formulas.
The Fluoride Debate Got Louder
Fluoride remains the most studied and most effective cavity-preventing ingredient in toothpaste, and major dental and pediatric organizations continue to recommend it. But the politics around it shifted sharply in 2025.
In May 2025, the FDA began action to pull ingestible fluoride supplements (drops and tablets that are swallowed) for children off the market, citing concerns about the gut microbiome and finalizing the move that October. It’s important to read what that action covers: the FDA explicitly distinguished swallowed supplements from topical fluoride in toothpaste and rinses, which you spit out and which it did not move against. The American Academy of Pediatrics and American Dental Association both pushed back hard, warning the broader anti-fluoride momentum could drive up tooth decay.
The underlying science is genuinely unsettled at the edges. A 2025 JAMA Pediatrics meta-analysis found an inverse association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ, but mostly at exposure levels well above US water-fluoridation concentrations, with the dose-response uncertain at lower levels. The takeaway for toothpaste users is narrow: spitting out a topical fluoride paste is a different exposure than swallowing a concentrated supplement, and the evidence against topical use remains thin. If your water is already fluoridated and you’d rather avoid it, that’s a reasonable personal choice, and there’s now a better-supported alternative than there used to be.
Hydroxyapatite: The Fluoride Alternative That’s Earning Its Claims
Nano-hydroxyapatite is a synthetic version of the mineral that makes up tooth enamel, and has moved from niche fluoride alternative to credible option. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in the Journal of Dentistry concluded that hydroxyapatite toothpaste can be an effective alternative to fluoride for preventing caries progression and remineralizing early lesions, with the added pitch of strong biocompatibility. A 2025 narrative review of recent clinical trials reached a similar conclusion, calling it a safe and effective option, especially for children or anyone at risk of fluoride overexposure, with possible added benefits for tooth sensitivity.
While the data is piling up fast, research on hydroxyapatite is earlier and thinner than fluoride’s decades of data, and some trials are industry-funded. Second — and this is the irony — hydroxyapatite is one of the ingredients flagged as a potential heavy-metals vector when it’s not well purified. The lesson isn’t to avoid it; it’s to favor brands that publish third-party purity testing.
Animal Welfare
It may surprise you that some toothpastes contain animal products. Propolis is sourced from bees. Unless specified otherwise, calcium phosphate and glycerin can be derived from animal bone and fat. If you’d rather not brush with animal byproducts, look for vegan-certified products.
Even toothpastes without animal ingredients may have been tested on animals. To avoid those, look for Leaping Bunny certified products. Vegan and cruelty-free aren’t the same thing, so a product can carry one certification without the other.
Packaging
Toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes can be recycled, but it’s not as simple as tossing them in the curbside bin. Most tubes are multi-layer plastic that local programs can’t process. That’s slowly changing: Tom’s of Maine, Colgate (though Bloomberg found the company’s recyclability claims aren’t well supported), and other brands are transitioning to recyclable plastic tubes.
Tube-free products sidestep the packaging problem entirely. Toothpaste tablets and chewables come in glass or metal-tin packaging, tooth powders ship in tins or jars, and some brands now use aluminum pods.
Sorting the Concerns by How Much They Matter
Not every flagged ingredient carries the same weight. Here’s a plain-language triage based on current evidence:
| Concern | What the evidence says | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Heavy metals (lead, arsenic) | Real but small relative to diet and dust; below federal limits, above some state and baby-food limits. No safe level of lead exists. | Use a pea-sized amount; favor brands publishing purity testing; supervise kids’ brushing. |
| Titanium dioxide | Cosmetic only, no dental benefit; EU genotoxicity concerns; still legal in toothpaste. | Easy to skip — it does nothing for your teeth. Check the label for CI 77891. |
| Phosphates | Mainly an environmental concern (algal blooms), not a personal-health one. | Choose phosphate-free if available; not in every brand. |
| SLS (sulfates) | Not carcinogenic; can irritate sensitive tissue and trigger canker sores. | Go SLS-free only if you get canker sores or have sensitivity. |
| Fluoride | Topical use (spit out) remains well supported; concerns center on swallowed supplements at high doses. | Keep using it, or switch to clinically supported hydroxyapatite if you prefer fluoride-free. |
What You Can Do
You don’t need to throw out your toothpaste. A few practical moves address the real concerns without overcorrecting for the overblown ones:
- Use a pea-sized amount. It’s the single most effective step for cutting any ingredient exposure. The risk assessment found it erases most heavy-metal concerns, and it make the tube last longer, which reduces waste.
- Supervise young kids’ brushing. Children swallow more toothpaste than adults, so they’re the most relevant group for any ingestion concern. Use a rice-grain smear for under-3s and a pea for older kids.
- Favor transparency. Choose brands that publish third-party testing for heavy-metal purity, especially if your paste contains hydroxyapatite, calcium carbonate, or bentonite clay.
- Skip the purely cosmetic stuff. Titanium dioxide adds whiteness and nothing else. Check the ingredient list for “CI 77891” and pick a formula without it.
- Keep brushing with an effective active. Fluoride (spit it out) or clinically supported hydroxyapatite both prevent cavities. Don’t trade a proven benefit for an unproven fear.
- Ditch the tube where you can. Tablets, powders, and tinned formats avoid multi-layer plastic.
- Don’t run the tap. Leaving the water running while you brush can waste up to four gallons of fresh water each time, even with a low-flow faucet.
Toothpaste is cleaner than the scariest headlines suggest and messier than the industry would like to admit. The contamination is real, the regulatory ceiling is too high, and the fixes are simple. Brush well, use less, read the label, and don’t let the noise talk you out of caring for your teeth.
Related Reading
- Toothpaste Ingredients To Avoid
- How To Make Your Own Toothpaste
- Recycling Toothbrushes and Toothpaste Tubes
- Vegan and Cruelty-Free Certifications, Explained
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Gemma Alexander on January 3, 2022, and was substantially updated in June 2026, when we added the 2025 findings on heavy-metal contamination, the FDA’s fluoride-supplement action, titanium dioxide regulation, and clinical evidence on hydroxyapatite.
The post How Clean Is Your Toothpaste? appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/health/how-clean-is-your-toothpaste/
Last winter, we kept our house at 60 degrees and our electric bill was STILL $280. I’ve been interested in solar for a long time, but on the long list of house projects (especially when you’re restoring a 200 year old house on the historic registry) some are more pressing than others.
But with a few of those major projects wrapping up, and a daunting bill before me, I figured now was the time for a quick google search on solar panels, and let me tell you….. It can be very overwhelming.
Figuring out the rules (cough, cough, historic society), incentives or rebates if applicable, how much it would cost, how much we could save, etc. felt a little like a part-time job. But, one website made it really easy to compare things, and I am happy to be partnering with Aurora Solar to share that site with you.
Because I think you should be able to easily run the numbers on your house without a lot of hassle!
This post is sponsored by Aurora Solar, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
If you’ve ever gotten a solar quote, there’s a good chance that Aurora Solar was involved. Aurora was founded in 2013 after its co-founders spent seven months trying to design a solar energy system using a patchwork of different tools.
Afterall, designing a solar system shouldn’t be harder than actually installing one. So they built software specifically for solar professionals. Today, more than 7,000 solar organizations use Aurora, and more than 20 million solar projects have been designed using the platform. They are also the largest solar software provider in the world. Their software is used by roughly 80% of the top 75 residential solar companies in the U.S.
All of this tech has been primarily used by professional installers to map your roof and then create a proposal, but now Aurora is offering this tech to us to help compare quotes.
So instead of having to call a bunch of different installers, I could use the Aurora Solar Marketplace to understand my solar potential, compare estimates, understand my possible savings, look into battery storage and other home electrification incentives, and map out different financing options.
1. know how much electricity the system will actually produce
Before you even get into the price, make sure you understand what you’re actually being quoted.
Two solar systems can have very different prices because they may not be the same size or produce the same amount of electricity. A cheaper system might simply have fewer panels and offset less of your electric bill.
With Aurora, you can compare solar estimates and see the system size, energy production, and how much electricity the system should offset.
You can also upload your utility bill to get a solar estimate based more closely on your actual energy usage, to make the quote accurate for you instead of a ‘generic household’.
2. understand the solar payback period
Aurora calculates things like payback period and lifetime savings, which makes it much easier to understand the long-term finances.
The solar payback period is basically how long it takes for your estimated savings to make up for what you spent on the system, and this is the number that surprised me most!
One estimate had a payback period of around 7 years, and another was closer to 11 years! Over 25 years, two of the estimates I looked at had almost a $13,000 difference in projected savings.
Of course, these are still projections as electricity rates can change (HELLO 2026) but when you’re trying to compare two options for the same house, knowing that one is projected to pay for itself four years sooner is pretty useful information.
3. look beyond the monthly payment
Depending on the installer, you may be looking at a cash purchase, solar loan, lease, or power purchase agreement.
But thankfully with Aurora you can compare the different financing options side-by-side which makes it a lot easier to see the trade-offs. One option may have a lower upfront cost, another may have a lower monthly payment, and another may give you better long-term savings.
4. find out which solar incentives actually apply to you
The minute you start Googling solar, you can find federal incentives, state incentives, utility programs, rebates, net metering, and a whole bunch of information that may or may not even apply to where you live.
And some of the articles ranking at the top of Google are several years old! (RIP to the federal incentives canceled at the end of 2025.) But, Aurora can account for solar incentives when calculating the cost and savings of a system, including state, local, and utility-specific programs.
I would still double check any incentive or tax benefit you’re planning to use before signing a contract, especially because programs and eligibility can change, but having all the relevant information in the same place makes the research process much less overwhelming.
5. research the installer, equipment, and warranties
Aurora lets you compare solar installers based on things like reviews, reputation, pricing, and financing options, which I think is just as important as the actual quote.
I’d also look closely at what equipment is included. What panels are they using? What kind of inverter? How long are the equipment warranties? Is there also a workmanship warranty from the installer? Who handles repairs if something goes wrong five or ten years from now?
And, I know I’ve said it a million times, but it’s nice to see it side-by-side without having to fill out a bunch of forms and be hounded on the phone just to get an idea of what solar may look like.
The post How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: XPRIZE’s David Babson on Why Climate Grand Challenges Need Buyers, Too
Buyers contracted nearly 30 million tons of durable carbon removal in 2025, more than triple the 2024 total, according to CDR.fyi data reported by Heatmap. About 90% of those purchases came from a single company, Microsoft, and suppliers delivered only about 450,000 tons during the year. That is a sliver of the six to 10 billion tons of removal a year that climate scenarios suggest the world will need by 2050. The technology to pull carbon out of the air works, but the customers needed to scale it remain scarce.
Our guest today, David Babson, is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. He calls the slow progress a market failure, because the technology is progressing faster than it is being adopted. Babson previously led MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and was a program director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. His portfolio includes XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which drew 1,334 teams and whose participants have raised more than $3.3 billion. In April 2025, Mati Carbon won its $50 million grand prize for spreading crushed basalt on smallholder farms in India, where the rock locks away carbon dioxide. “If people could make money taking carbon out of the air and putting it underground, as opposed to only being able to make money taking it from underground and putting it in the air, we would be in a better place,” Babson says. Mati is weathering the slump in part because its rock dust also improves soil health and crop yields, giving farmers a reason to participate that doesn’t depend on carbon credit prices.
XPRIZE’s answer is to change what winners receive. Babson describes “mixed purses” that pair a cash award with a guaranteed buyer through an advance market commitment, a power purchase agreement, or an offtake contract. In one thought experiment, a carbon removal prize would come with a separate $1 billion fund raised from credit buyers, which qualified teams could draw on as they deliver verified tons. XPRIZE is applying the same thinking to a planned series of fusion energy prizes, pairing technical milestones with market mechanisms to build the supply chain that commercial fusion will require. The same gap between invention and adoption shows up in other XPRIZE competitions. On September 23, XPRIZE Wildfire awarded about $4.55 million from its $11 million purse, with defense contractor Anduril Industries taking first place in autonomous fire response along with a $1 million Lockheed Martin bonus. Babson expects costs to fall as fire agencies adopt the tools and as startups license individual components into cheaper platforms, though underfunded agencies will need a way to buy the first systems. He also notes that the competition left fuel management and ground-based autonomy for future prizes. Earlier this year, program director Andrea Santy told us that field testing had moved ahead of drone regulations. In biodiversity, Limelight Rainforest won $5 million for surveying 100 hectares of tropical forest in under 24 hours and identifying more than 250 species. Biodiversity still lacks a price, but Babson argues that once ecosystems can be measured, slow-walking policy becomes “a dereliction of what they should be doing.”
We also discuss the tension inside XPRIZE’s vision of “equitable abundance,” including a $101 million Healthspan prize that could add years of consumption to longer lives. Babson argues that abundant, cheap clean energy would let society move beyond efficiency as its organizing principle, powering uses such as indoor vertical farms that could return millions of acres of farmland to nature. You can follow XPRIZE’s new competitions and get involved in its prize ideation workshops at xprize.org.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 00:36
Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s talk about the power and the uses of grand challenge programs to kickstart low-carbon industries and respond to the changing environment. Over the past several years, we’ve talked on the show with leaders of grand challenge programs designed to accelerate progress on humanity’s most difficult challenges, from pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to fighting rapidly growing wildfire threats in cities and rural communities. Many of these competitions have been launched by XPRIZE, whose leaders have shared on the show the stories of these competitions as they launched and unfolded.
Today is a chance to take stock, to look back and think about how climate markets, technology, and politics are changing fast, and how that makes this a good moment to ask the question: Are these programs designed to accelerate progress actually delivering that progress?
Our guest today designs XPRIZE’s climate bets. David Babson is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. Before XPRIZE, he was the executive director of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and a program director at the U.S. Energy Department’s ARPA-E energy technology research agency.
His portfolio includes the largest incentive in prize history. In 2025, Mati Carbon received a $50 million grand prize for their enhanced rock weathering solution for capturing and drawing down carbon, and XPRIZE now reports that companies participating in its programs have raised $3.3 billion. That carbon removal win arrived just as the removal market hit serious turbulence, and as XPRIZE’s wildfire competition wrapped up with its top prize still unclaimed.
So we’re going to discuss what grand challenges can really accomplish, which winners continue to build and which stall, and what the reasons are, as well as the tensions inside a portfolio that funds both climate solutions and longer human lifespans. We’ll get to the conversation right after this brief commercial break. Stay tuned.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, and welcome, David Babson, to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
David Babson 03:10
I’m doing well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 03:11
I’m glad to have you here. You’ve run research portfolios at ARPA-E and MIT. What can a prize purse accomplish that a well-funded grant program can’t, or are they complementary?
David Babson 03:22
They’re absolutely complementary. The way that I think about it is that the value of these different mechanisms for promoting innovation is at different parts of the innovation supply chain, if you will. A prize is not a substitute for the very necessary investments that places like governments make into basic, applied, and advanced research. In fact, those types of investments are really valuable for establishing the innovation ecosystems and the technical capacities to eventually win prizes.
Where the prize is very valuable is somewhat downstream: translating technologies, ideas, and innovations that are coming out of academia and labs to market for scale. It challenges the innovators to imagine those technical capacities as solutions to global challenges, and then the visibility that the prize brings to those translations of technologies de-risks funding to flow to those innovators so they can imagine their uses in practice.
So I actually see them as very complementary, particularly when it comes to solutions in the energy and climate space that require rapid adoption of technologies in markets to have impact. Just having an energy solution or a climate solution is not valuable unless it can be de-risked and connected to markets to scale for impact. And that’s what the prize is actually very good at doing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 05:22
That comes through in the impact report that you all published recently. About 1,300 different organizations were catalyzed. The groups came together, apparently, because of their desire to compete in the competition.
What I’ve found in my work with public-private partnerships, in particular, is that impact investors are looking for that initial traction, and to a degree, the prize and the distribution of money within the prize group is that catalyst that says there’s a real opportunity for an impact profit, something that both does good and is profitable. How does the organization consult with the financial communities that are going to back these companies once your prize has been awarded? Is there a backroom conversation about that, for lack of a better way of putting it?
David Babson 06:10
Not an explicit backroom conversation about it, but the prize itself brings attention to the innovations that are coming out to win the competition. Oftentimes, as you’re noting, these impact investing communities exist, and they are looking for technologies to invest in to have impact.
What the prize is effective at doing is casting a wider net and surfacing the best solutions across the board, where there may have been silos in the past, or there may not have been transparency to individual investors about where to put their money. The prize is capable of elevating all of them, creating better visibility, and therefore, just by its inherent operation, creates better opportunities for investment capital to flow to the right types of teams to have greater impact more quickly.
So we don’t have explicit discussions with those types of investor communities to have them directly connected to individual prizes. But we often consult with investors and experts in industry to inform the metrics that we would want to have demonstrated, so that we know that when teams are winning our competitions, the demonstrations that they do are de-risking capital to flow to those innovators so that they can be translated to market.
Mitch Ratcliffe 07:47
We’re talking about growing industries, which of course means diversifying into a lot of specializations. Once you’ve got this kind of anchor winning team or teams, how does XPRIZE think about propagating the information that’s necessary for the rest of the industry to grow and fill in around them, in order to provide the kind of comprehensive geographic coverage and range of functions that are necessary for the industry to thrive? Is that something that you think about cultivating, like you would in agriculture?
David Babson 08:22
It is something that we think a lot about. With a few of the more recent prize competitions that we’ve run, we have also paired those competitions with a subsequent impact phase, which is designed to further build the community that has been established through the operation of the prize and connect the technologies that came out of the competition to the right types of markets and investors so that they can scale.
So that is one of the things that we’re thinking about in future competitions as well: not just running an innovation competition to surface new innovations, but how do we augment the community building that the prize provides as a way to also promote the back-end business models and industries that can scale those solutions for impact?
Mitch Ratcliffe 09:19
How would you describe the patterns you’re looking for that indicate that an organization can become that durable enterprise? What separates them from the rest? Have you got thoughts about that?
David Babson 09:29
I do have thoughts about it. In a lot of ways, the rigorous metrics that we set up when we’re designing the competition are informed by what experts believe would be the necessary demonstrations to actually generate a solution that is market viable. So a lot of it is very quantitative in terms of how we architect the competition.
But what we’ve also seen is that there are elements of winning teams that can’t always be controlled by just the scientific metrics. A lot of times, it’s the composition of the team, how diverse they are, and the unique mentality that the leaders of the team have in terms of their vision and their ambition. Those are parts that you can’t control for, but the prize model is very effective at also attracting the type of entrepreneurial, big-thinking individuals that actually tend to be behind some of the most successful companies.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:40
Those big-thinking individuals often struggle with the transition from inventor. And to your point about the academic community often being the source of many of the teams that are competing, that’s not something that academics are necessarily good at. As part of the prize process, do you also begin to coach them on how to staff for the operators who are going to be able to translate the invention into a market success?
David Babson 11:04
Absolutely. On the front end, the prize itself sets a target that is typically beyond what researchers in an academic setting are imagining for what they’re doing. It gives them a way to imagine their technical innovations as scalable solutions to big problems