Adam Torres and Emily Musil Church discuss the Milken–Motsepe Innovation Prize Program.
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Show Notes:
In this episode, Adam Torres and Emily Musil Church, Ph.D, Senior Director, Social Innovation at Milken Institute, explore the Milken–Motsepe Innovation Prize program.
Watch Full Interview:
About Emily Musil Church
Emily Musil Church, PhD, is a senior director at MI Philanthropy, where she leads the Social Innovation portfolio. An expert in future-focused, high-impact engagement and programming, Emily and her team create strategies for inclusive and effective giving, and design and operate programs using a range of philanthropic tools focused on innovation and impact. Under her leadership, she has built the prize competition program for the Institute, and has created wide- ranging programming including mobilizing and supporting hundreds of entrepreneurs working on off-grid green energy in sub-Saharan Africa, and cross-sector workshops to design new solutions to prevent gun violence in the US.
Emily spent over a decade in academia where, as a college professor, she specialized in human rights, African history, and global development. She then joined the XPRIZE Foundation where she led the education and human equity domain, operating initiatives and large-scale innovation competitions to find and test new technology solutions to solve global challenges. She is passionate about exploring the ethics of our rapidly advancing technologies.
She has a Ph.D. and M.A. from UCLA, and graduated with honors from Drew University. She won a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship and conducted in-depth research in over a dozen countries on three continents. She has served on the OECD’s Senior Advisory Group for Blended Finance and the Advisory Board for CompTIA’s Center for Technology & Workforce Solutions (CTWS). She currently serves on the Board of Trustees for Drew University.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I want to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and I’m proud to announce that I am at the 2024 Milking Global Conference in Beverly Hills. This is our second year covering the conference, and I was able to get a repeat, an additional interview with Emily Musil Church, who, let me just say, First off, Emily, you were our top last year.
We did a whole series around this. I think we did seven or eight interviews and your interview last year was our top interview with over 20, 000 views. So, Hey, welcome back. Thank you. And thanks to everybody who watched let’s hope we can do another great show that people want to listen to. All right, Emily.
So a little birdie told me that you were in a ballgown earlier giving away an award. Talk to me. What was going on? I missed the ballgown. Well, there’s nothing really that’s going to get you to wear a ballgown on a Monday morning at 9 a. m. other than getting to give out. A million dollars, a surprise million dollars to an entrepreneur who’s been working to change the world.
So today we had our milk and what’s up a prize in green energy award ceremony. We had five finalists who out of thousands down to Hundreds down to 20 semi finalists who we funded. These are the five remaining finalists. We tested them in South Africa two months ago, judges selected a grand prize winner for a million and a runner up for 250, 000.
So today. People got to meet all five. If you go to the website, we still, you should be able to watch the ceremony. If you missed it, you can meet and understand what these innovators were doing, creating green energy solutions that work off grid. So getting electricity from hydro, solar, geothermal, all these sources that are good for the planet, green sources that are affordable, reliable, sustainable electricity, Even if people are completely off the grid, they’d be able to have enough electricity to power, whatever they need, business, school, that sort of thing.
So these are really world changers out there. So to be able to celebrate them is definitely worth getting in a ball gown for on a Monday morning. I’m all for it. And I I’m so curious just to be like in your shoes, what goes into into like, how many applications were there? Like what goes into this selection process?
Cause I don’t know how you do. I mean, your team is amazing. Yeah. What goes into this? Yeah. Well it, the word team is team. Team, of course. Yeah. Definitely. There. This is, there is a huge world of people who are part of this. You know, some may go and just see, oh, great, here’s a trophy and a million dollar check.
Yeah. But what goes into that process is really, it’s not just selection. It starts earlier than that. It’s about recruiting people to the world of entrepreneurship. Mm. So, so many people have ideas for things. Or they see a problem and they say, I wish somebody else would fix that. So part of our mission is to be able to say anybody who has a good idea or sees a problem and things, maybe, maybe I have an idea somewhere that we want to be able to help support them.
Think about how do you turn that idea into something that is a prototype? How do you test that? How do you build a business plan? So it’s not just. Only about down selecting. It is actually casting a wide net, getting people to be inspired by a particular topic. Last year was Agritech. This year is green energy and we give them capacity building.
We had over 3000 hours of mentorship of Stanford online courses. So we really want to make sure that even if they don’t win that million dollar prize, that being part of the milk and what’s up a prize community is something of value to them. Talk a little bit more just about the prize in general and why it was originally developed.
So the Milken Mutsepe Prize. Yes. So this is the Milken Mutsepe Innovation Prize Program was started in 2021 with the idea that every year there’ll be a different challenge linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. So last year was Agritech and we awarded that. At last year’s global conference, this year is green energy and we just announced today in the ball gown on stage, the next Malcolm would set a prize that has another 2 million.
We’re giving out. Yeah. It’s going to be in. It’s not where it’s a, what it’s Fintech. Oh, Fintech. Okay. Yes. So this is hot off the press. Wow. So you can, this is the first year when I get you on the show, we’re going to be talking about the Fintech award. We’ll be talking about Fintech. How do we get financial inclusion for people in emerging and frontier markets?
Yeah. What went into, so this year some of the award winners, you don’t have to say names if you don’t want to, or otherwise, but like, what were some of the themes around those that were selected? So all of them had to create something that would be affordable is one criteria. So there’s lots of things that we can do now.
Happily. There’s lots of new green tech that you can use for electricity generation. We wanted to make sure this is something that. Everyday people, wherever they are will be able to afford. So affordability was one scalability. So we were looking for companies that we believe we’re going to be able to scale and help the most, the highest number of people possible.
So scalability was big. Obviously we looked at environmental impact and then there’s all the technical specs. So they had to make sure they had a minimum of 60 kilowatt hours per 24 hours. Of electricity generation. So that means something like, you know, there, some generation is for a light bulb, which is great for people to have something like that.
The idea behind that amount of electricity was so that somebody would have enough to start their own business. So the idea that it’s not just about the entrepreneurs creating these green energy solutions, but they’re providing electricity so that so many other people would be able to start their Their own businesses, what how do people get involved with this?
Like how did, whether, whether it comes from like submissions or it’s the other side funding or like, like how do people walk us into that ecosystem or let us into that ecosystem? It’s pretty simple. So anybody can go to milk and what’s up a prize. org. They registered to be part of our prize community for that.
We send out regular sort of monthly resources from anybody who goes to, to the milk, what’s up a prize community can see we have a whole library of resources. So we don’t assume people are going through the library. Like I’m going to read today. So we try to, you know, say, Hey, check out this one or if something new comes up or if there’s an opportunity.
So we, we want at the very basic level, somebody to have somewhere to go to If they’re even just interested is I want to learn a little more, but if they then want to compete, we let people know when registration closes. In this case, people would have through the summer to be able to submit what they, you know, that they think they could be the winner.
And there are two rounds. So for this next coming competition in FinTech. There are going to be 10 teams selected that will get 100, 000 each. A lot of good done with that. Exactly. And then again, there’ll be a million dollar grand prize at next year’s global conference. Wow. I want you to look into the camera.
Give me a moment to ask the question. People that have not been to the milking global conference, why should, whether they’re corporate, whether executives, otherwise look into the camera, why should everyone be attending this conference? If you have not yet been to the Milken Institute Global Conference you’re missing out.
This is a extraordinary high voltage multi day conference where you have the best minds in many different sectors. There’s also a A very large representation from the finance industry. So I believe we have over 32 trillion of assets under management represented at our global conference, heads of states, movie stars academics, scientists, Elon Musk is here, David Beckham, you know, sports owners, players.
So really the idea here is to bring people from across sectors to be able to talk to each other about. Ideas that really matter. And so often we are just polarized or we have the same conversation with the same people who either have the same political beliefs or they’re from the same sector or whatever it may be.
So the idea here is really to have. Civil forward thinking conversations with people who are from a different part of some sort of ecosystem than you are. We want to make sure we have different perspectives that are put out. So we have, we’re fiercely nonpartisan. Everybody is here. We want to have conversations ranging from things, whether it’s gun violence, prevention, the future of AI, inclusive capitalism, climate sports, philanthropy rare disease, whatever it might be to really say, let’s all get together and say, how can we work together to have real solutions?
Moving forward. Amazing. Join us. Amazing. Yes. I agree. And and I mean, for me, I’ll just let everybody know. So, I mean, I’ve been nine years. Today’s my nine year anniversary. First one I ever went to was nine years ago. This is my second. I’ll tell you when I first came here, I was a fine, I was in finance and I was here for, as an executive for another company.
And, you know, now nine years later, I’m looking at this. My second year is media. I wasn’t even in business. business when I was coming to this conference. And I remember I would have never thought I’d be covering it one day. And now to see, I can say as an executive, when I used to come, it was amazing, amazing experience.
But now that I’m, you know, part of media and I’m behind the scenes looking, I mean, the, the, everybody’s top notch, everybody that I’ve seen, everybody, even the media side, the, the, the programming, everything, it doesn’t get better. So, Hey. Highly encourage everyone to come. One last time, how do people learn more about the prize website?
Maybe website milk and what’s up a prize. org. You can also go to milk and institute. org and learn about our broader competition program. So we do all sorts of competitions, awards in different subjects. And we are always looking for bold new ideas and innovators. So we’d love to meet people.
Please reach out. Yep. And come to our conference. Amazing. And for everybody watching, don’t worry. We will put all that information in the show notes. So you can just click on the link and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with us, don’t forget, hit that subscribe button.
We got many more entrepreneurs and executives and conferences coming up for you.
