���˴�Ƭ-�����ۺ���-���޳�������

Next year marks a milestone in human achievement: 100 years since Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight in the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic.

Lindbergh’s 33-hour journey in May 1927 wasn’t just about adventure. There was a prize. Hotelier Raymond Orteig had offered $25,000 (about $465,000 today) to the first person to fly non-stop between New York and Paris.

The Orteig Prize ignited a wave of aviation advancement in the 1920s and 1930s. It remains a classic example of how incentive prizes can accelerate technology.

Eric Beynon, Com’98, knows the power of prizes. He may be the only person to have both launched a global competition and won one, too. 

In 2015, as a sustainability consultant, Mr. Beynon helped create the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, a US$20-million competition to turn carbon emissions into useful products.

And just over a year ago, as chief impact officer at Colorado-based ATS Energy, Mr. Beynon accepted the Earthshot Prize for ATS’s system that turns industrial waste heat into electricity. Launched by Prince William, Earthshot is often described as the Nobel Prize of environmentalism. Every year, five winners each receive £1 million.

“In aviation, the Orteig Prize helped spark the modern air travel industry,” Mr. Beynon says. “Today, Earthshot and the XPRIZE aim to spark similar leaps in climate and clean technology.”

So, how did a kid from Toronto become a catalyst for environmental change?

It began in the early 2000s. After graduating from Queen’s, Mr. Beynon moved to Zurich to work in finance. He was then offered an unexpected role: executive director of Business Action for Sustainable Development (BASD), an umbrella organization setting the global business agenda on climate, environmental, and social issues at the United Nations and with governments.

At the time, environmentalists were protesting in the streets while governments were only beginning to act. Businesses realized they had a role, and Mr. Beynon was brought in to help them take action.

But he eventually saw a problem. “Firms were doing a lot of strategy work, but there was a gap in innovation to deliver solutions,” he says.

That observation led him to launch Sustainable Growth Company in 2006 to bridge that divide. For example, Mr. Beynon worked with Barrick Mining and World Vision Canada on one of the world’s first business–NGO partnerships, a $1.3-million program to create jobs and skills training in northern Peru.

Soon, carbon capture caught his attention. Mr. Beynon wondered: “What if we could turn CO2 into a valuable product that people can use? Then we’d stop wasting it and stop putting it into the atmosphere.”

That question became the foundation for the Carbon XPRIZE. Mr. Beynon was a principal architect, bringing governments and global energy firms together to support it with over $100 million deployed. In 2021, it was awarded to two firms: CarbonCure of Dartmouth, N.S., and CarbonBuilt from Los Angeles for technologies that use CO2 in cement.

His work with ATS tackles another problem: industry around the world loses about 60 per cent of its energy as wasted heat. ATS’s solid-state generator converts that heat into electricity without turbines or moving parts. “This marks the beginning of the solid-state era in industrial power,” he says of the achievement. In November 2024, Mr. Beynon and a colleague stood on a stage at an Oscars-style award show in Cape Town, South Africa, to accept the Fix Our Climate Earthshot Prize presented to ATS by model and businesswoman Heidi Klum.

Mr. Beynon says prizes like Earthshot and the XPRIZE can unlock innovations in emerging fields that tackle sustainability challenges. The Carbon XPRIZE “helped legitimize carbon utilization,” he notes, and even teams that didn’t win have grown their businesses and attracted investment and customers. 

You could say that, like the Spirit of St. Louis, these competitions are helping bold ideas take flight.