BIG CHANCE FOR INVENTORS
Intel, Mark Burnett team up for contest
Winner of ‘America’s Greatest Makers’ will take home
$1 million,
Tech is so hot right now that the creator of Sur
vivor, Shark Tank and The Apprentice has signed on to create a new show, America’s Greatest
Makers — and it has a $1 million prize.
“Right now in rural America somewhere, there’s a person or a team of people who have an idea. They’re working in their garage but they don’t know how to get it out,” United Artists Media Group CEO Mark Burnett, creator of a long list of award-winning and wildly popular reality TV shows, said in an interview with USA TODAY.
That outlet now exists, he said.
At the decidedly unmainstream Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, Burnett announced that he’s teaming up with the chip maker and Turner Entertainment to create the new franchise.
Inventors across America are being invited to submit short videos presenting their ideas for either wearable technologies or smart connected consumer devices powered by Intel’s Curie, a button-sized computer.
“We want to unleash the power of innovation,” Steve Fund, Intel’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview.
In the spring, Burnett and his Intel team will winnow the submissions down to 16 to 20 finalists. The inventors have to have the technical chops necessary to launch their ideas but will also get support from and be mentored by Intel engineers on how to prototype them.
“Intel is just helping them to walk that path; it’s not going to carry them,” said Burnett.
Over the course of a 12week run, the show will air across multiple Turner Broadcasting broadcast, digital, social and mobile entertainment platforms. It will showcase the work and process of the finalists.
The winning person or team will earn $1 million.
“We’re going to change people’s lives. And they’re going to change the world,” Burnett said.
The contest comes as inventors and tinkerers, “makers” in today’s parlance, are increasingly front and center. Maker Faires, a combination science-and-county fair, have taken the nation by storm. The first was held in 2008. Today, there are dozens worldwide.
“I am really excited because it’s so fresh,” Burnett said. “We’re going to spur the tech community, and the future tech community. These are people who never would have thought to invent something until they heard of
America’s Greatest Makers.”
The idea builds off the success of Intel’s Make it Wearable challenge last year, which carried a $500,000 grand prize.
It originally launched as something of a whim but took off in a way that Intel had found surprising. “We had 2,000 submissions, and we got 16 million views about it with literally no marketing,” Fund said.
After that, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich challenged his team to take it to the next level. That’s when they approached Burnett.
“For a lot of years I’ve been making a lot of hit shows. I turn down more than I do. But I said yes to this. Technology is such a part of youth culture now. It’s just a natural,” he said.
Burnett and Fund are already strategizing about where to take this next.
“It’s America’s Greatest Makers now. But we’ll have China’s Greatest Makers, Australia’s Greatest Makers, Brazil’s Greatest Mak
ers,” said Burnett. “The creativity out there is unlimited.”