Scientists and engineers working on harnessing wave and tidal power could be in the running for a £10m prize as part of a new competition launched yesterday by the Scottish government.

Speaking at the launch of the Saltire Prize at an event in Washington DC, Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond said that the prize represented a "call to action" for scientists around the world working on marine renewable energy technologies.

He added that the prize had the potential to deliver clear economic benefits and cement Scotland's position as a global leader in renewable energy technologies.

"Challenge prizes have led to amazing technological advances and contributed to hugely impressive returns on investment – from the Virgin Earth Challenge offering a $25m prize for the first person or organisation to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the Earth's atmosphere to the Ansari X Prize which saw the launch of private spacecraft and led to $200m of investment from a $10m prize fund," he said.

Terry Garcia, the National Geographic Society's head of global missions, and Scotland's chief scientific adviser Professor Anne Glover were announced as the first members of the prize committee and will now begin work on finalising the rules and criteria of the competition.

The government said that once the first prize is awarded it will be followed by a second prize focusing on a different area of cleantech innovation.

The launch of the prize came on the same day as Marine Current Turbines successfully commenced the installation of its SeaGen tidal turbine at Strangford Narrows in Northern Ireland.

The company said the 1.2Mw turbine is four times larger than the previous largest tidal stream system and will begin operation in the summer, at which point it will become the world's first commercial scale tidal power system.