Just about any process can be improved by being accelerated. Doing things faster means being able to do more. Getting faster means becoming more capable. If you can read faster, you can read more books in the same time. If you work faster, you can produce more work.

Each year the prizes would be awarded to those who accelerated the most important processes, or who achieved the greatest incremental acceleration on a process that has already been boosted.

There would probably have to be categories: medical, financial, industrial, agricultural. Getting a crop to grow in three weeks might seem painfully slow compared to completing a transaction in a thousandth of a second. But it’s all relative.