With all of the excitement and funding directed at artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and gene editing, it is hard to remember that one of the most consistently innovative and financially robust sectors in the United States is the “creative industry.”
Richard Andrews, Lecturer, Arts Entrepreneurship.
With all of the excitement and funding directed at artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and gene editing, it is hard to remember that one of the most consistently innovative and financially robust sectors in the United States is the “creative industry.”
According to a March 2019 National for the Endowment of the Arts report—the contribution of culture and art to the U.S. economy is $800 billion per year, bigger than economic output of Sweden. The report noted that more than 5 million Americans work in the arts-and-culture economy, generating nearly $400 billion in wages in 2016 from 35 key arts-and-culture fields, such as broadcasting, movies, streaming, publishing, the performing arts, and arts-related retail.
One of the people who knows this information best is Richard S. Andrews, who teaches arts entrepreneurship at Cal. Andrews has worked in arts management for over two decades—serving as associate director of the UC Berkeley Center for New Music and Audio Technologies and executive director of the Eco Ensemble—and has witnessed dramatic changes to the arts driven by digital outreach, distribution, and streaming and the culture of “free” content on the Internet. In an interview in Blum Hall, he pointed out that the vast majority of successful musicians today no longer make their income from song or album sales but from tickets for concerts and tours; meanwhile, streaming services and YouTube have become the new middlemen.
These changes, Andrews says, have increased the need for education not just in arts management but in arts entrepreneurship. Since 2013, Andrews’ courses have attracted students from arts and non-arts majors interested in the tools, techniques, and concepts needed to invent, launch, and sustain a business in the creative sector. He has even written a book on the subject, just out from Routledge.
Explains Richard: “My course is practical and hands-on. We go through the main business idea: What is the product or service you are offering? What problem does it solve? What needs does it address? How will you understand the premise of such a product or service in the marketplace? Can you do marketing analysis? Can you understand competition or partners? The thing about the arts as a business is you’re not necessarily trying to take customers away from the gallery or theater down the street. You might actually be collaborating with them.”
Richard Andrews teaches Arts Entrepreneurship classes and workshops along with guest lecturers.
This spring, with support from the Big Ideas Contest and the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, Andrews will teach LS 105 Arts Entrepreneurship Mondays 2-5 pm. In addition, he will offer a seminar tailored to Big Ideas finalists and non-finalists in the Art and Social Change track, which will meet four times during the semester. Students will learn concept development, marketing analysis and marketing plans, fundraising, legal issues, financial management, and then submit a business plan outline and present a short pitch. Guest presentations will include people from California Lawyers for the Arts, crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, and alumni working in various creative fields.
For Big Ideas Director Phillip Denny, the class and seminars are intended to provide Big Ideas applicants in the Art and Social Change track with instruction, feedback, and support as they develop and refine their art-based social start-up concepts. Denny notes that the Arts and Social Change track was developed eight years ago to diversify the ideas, projects, and students coming into the social innovation contest that now attracts 1200 students per year across all 10 University of California campuses and two foreign universities.
“We wanted to get more students from outside engineering and business,” explained Denny. “We wanted to get more women engaged. We wanted to open up entrepreneurship to other parts of the campus. We want to get more out-of-the-box ideas. And that has happened.”
Among the students who have benefitted from both the Big Ideas Contest and Andrews’ arts entrepreneurship class is Skylar Economy, who received her BA in Film & Media Studies in 2016 and has since co-founded Photogénie Films. “FITE Film,” a short documentary directed by Economy about four formerly incarcerated students at UC Berkeley and their path to higher education and success, was honored with the 2016 Clinton Global Initiative Selected Commitment, Fast Company’s World Changing Idea Finalist 2016, and Red Bull Amaphiko Social Entrepreneurship Finalist 2016.
Economy credits the combination of the Big Ideas Contest (FITE Film won first place in the Art & Social Change track in 2016) and Andrews’ course with her setting her on a path to arts entrepreneurship.
“Now I own an art business,” she said in a 2019 video interview. “If you had told me that when I was a freshman in college, I would never have believed it.”
In November 2019, the Big Ideas Contest received a record 438 pre-proposal applications, representing over 1,200 students across 12 campuses. After a preliminary round, 43 teams were advanced to the final round.
In November 2019, the Big Ideas Contest received a record 438pre-proposal applications, representing over 1,200 students across 12 campuses. After a preliminary round, 43 teams were advanced to the final round. These teams will now compete for awards ranging from $5,000 to $20,000. Winners will be announced in early May 2020.
The challenge for this track is to develop an innovative art project that meaningfully engages with issues of advocacy, justice, and community-building. The initiative may use any art form — visual/ conceptual art, photography, new media, video, dance, theater/performance art, music, creative writing, or other forms. Art must be central to the project, and the proposal must reflect an informed understanding of the particular art form(s) being used, as well as of the communities being served.
Earth Voices School: UC Davis The majority of American adults think global warming is happening, but almost half of American adults do not think it will affect their personal life. This is because of political bias and psychological distance to the consequences of climate change. Many projects, such as video-blogs, summer camps, and public outreach activities have been tackling these challenges to increase public engagement and desirable attitudes towards environmental problems. Earth Voices is an interactive podcast that guides listeners through an immersive experience, while walking a predetermined route in a city. Listeners would learn more about the different spheres of the Earth system and their relation with society through an embodied experience that will bring them closer to understanding the climate and the modern environmental problems society faces, as well as visualize themselves as part of the solution. Earth Voices will be available for free online and through main podcast platforms.
FakeNetAI School: UC Berkeley Over one billion hours of video are uploaded to the internet daily. Deepfakes, videos manipulated using deep learning techniques, represent a tiny fraction of those videos but are growing rapidly, doubling in the past nine months. Deepfake quality is improving to the point where the best are unidentifiable by human reviewers–and already have been used for nefarious purposes, including inserting a person into pornography or manipulating politics. As a result of the growing quality and ability to insert Deepfakes into a sea of uploaded content, the risk of their spreading and causing damage for content hosting companies is increasing. It is critical to be able to identify and react to Deepfakes by flagging or removing them. FakeNetAI’s Deepfake detection technology enables content hosting platforms to detect Deepfake content to counteract this growing threat. FakeNetAI’s technologies allow companies to respond to the threat even as Deepfakes continue to grow exponentially.
Impactify School: UC Berkeley Impactify addresses the disconnect between motivated and skilled individuals on the one side and under-resourced social projects on the other side. This inefficiency is an obstacle to positive social change in communities. By providing a platform for like-minded users and equipping users with useful skills and matching them to the most suitable engagement opportunities nearby, Impactify revolutionizes the way local problems are solved. When signing up for the application, users are asked to indicate which social causes they care about and which skills they already possess. Based on this information, users will be shown nearby events, open tasks, and ideas for social initiatives that have been posted by others. Users can easily swipe through those opportunities to indicate interest, add their own ideas or events to the platform, and invite friends to join. By creating such a virtual market place, Impactify aims to encourage, educate, and equip changemakers in their communities.
Mindset & Milestones School: UC Los Angeles While the battle for gender equity continues, girls have to be prepared to succeed in society as it stands. That requires the confidence to fight for a seat at existing tables and the confidence to create new ones. Plainly stated, girls need educational and engaging spaces. Mindset & Milestones seeks to address the problem of self-efficacy, confidence, and opportunity deficits for girls by introducing them to entrepreneurial learning curriculum. The primary delivery of the curriculum will be via the workbook “Mindset & Milestones: A Girl’s Guide to Thinking Like An Entrepreneur” and in-person workshops. Entrepreneurship is not only a powerful way to exercise problem-solving skills, but it also allows girls to find the value in their ideas and find a way to succeed in the face of adversity. In the end, the vision is for girls to leave programs feeling like they have the ability to create something from nothing and contribute to any environment.
Theater to Heighten Community Voices: Dharavi Slum School: UC Davis Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India, which boasts a unique economy and culture, is currently threatened with destruction due to the government’s plan for redevelopment. This project seeks to use theater as a means of uplifting community voices to preserve the neighborhood. Through a series of workshops, young participants will develop creative means of telling their personal stories about the positive aspects of their community, as well as the challenges they face. This will culminate in the creation of an original show, which will be performed for both slum residents and the greater Mumbai area, celebrating community voices and combating negative perceptions about the slum. The project also serves as a means of qualitative data collection in a severely under-researched area. This project seeks to promote a humanizing perspective of a particularly marginalized group of people with the hopes that the government and wider Mumbai society will learn about the wealth of culture Dharavi holds.
When You Were Young School: UC Berkeley When You Were Young represents a previously untold story about child sexual abuse and healing from the perspective of a black woman, through her own courageous emergence on screen. This impact campaign, accompanying the film, will be the first to address the needs and interests of the audience by focusing on black girls and women and creating a safe space for public conversations, specifically in black communities. The lack of such films has historically left communities of color feeling invisible, a feeling that is only compounded for a victim of child sexual abuse. The film follows Aqueila Lewis, an adult survivor of child sexual abuse, as she works to confront the generational cycle of child sexual abuse within her family. When You Were Young’s campaign will include a pre-viewing guide featuring support and resources for people directly impacted by child sexual abuse, as well as indirectly impacted allies, family members, and community.
Cities & Communities
The challenge for this track is to describe a novel solution to engage and enhance the wellbeing of communities, campuses, and cities. These innovations should stimulate new thinking to address key physical, social, or economic challenges facing geographic locales ranging from university settings to global metropolises. Solutions may focus on a wide range of areas, including but not limited to: improving the living conditions of urban environments, promoting civic engagement, sharing knowledge and information, making transportation options more accessible, and empowering individuals to improve their own well-being.
Mansa Taxi School: Makerere University One of Kampala’s main forms of transportation is the matatus (a 14-16 seater van/bus). These vehicles operate without strict regulation or organization, causing heavy traffic jams, congestion, and accidents that result in increased vehicle emissions and degraded ambient air quality. Mansa Taxi’s solution is a token-based system for matatu bookings and payments whereby passengers pre-purchase tokens that entitle them to a specific travel distance, and therefore a specific destination, accessible via phone smart and feature phones. Through Mansa Taxi, matatus are tracked in real-time to ensure that they follow proper driving guidelines, passengers don’t have to scuffle to get seats, and remittances from trips are wired to drivers. Mansa Taxi will lend order to a currently chaotic transport system and allow better planning for passengers, matatu operators, and owners, alleviating the heavy congestion caused by these matatus as well as their significant contribution to air pollution in the city.
Mushroom School: UC Berkeley Climate change is the single largest issue threatening a sustainable future for humanity. Mushroom is focused on addressing the intention-action gap, the difference between what people say they want to do and what they actually do, for individuals who are interested in contributing to the fight against climate change. Using behavioral economics to help users make sustainable lifestyle choices, Mushroom facilitates emissions reductions and builds community around protecting the environment. The application uses a diagnostic test to generate quests that align with user interests and commitment levels. These quests challenge users to make incremental steps toward establishing sustainable habits, using gaming elements like streaks and leaderboards to keep user motivation high and minimize attrition. Mushroom tracks these lifestyle changes and quantifies the emissions reductions associated with them, grouping similar users and fostering friendly competition between them. By showing users that others are also working towards similar goals, Mushroom creates a community around battling climate change.
Singe School: UC Irvine Over the past four years there have been approximately 34 million acres of land lost to wildfires in the U.S. The mission of Singe is to extinguish wildfires before they grow to a size that needs firefighter intervention, or slows down the fire until support is available. This increases response effectiveness and decreases yearly fire damage costs. The Singe modules are automated fire extinguishing units placed in an array and anchored in high risk fire zones. The units are temperature sensitive activating at close to 200 Fahrenheit and are filled with a biodegradable high expansion extinguishing foam, each able to cover an estimated 150 square feet. This modular system can be placed in forested areas and around at risk homes, aiming to be a life saver, cost reducer, and provide fire awareness. Singe aims to be a global product/service and be considered the go-to first line of defense for incoming fires during fire season
Strategic Wind Turbine Deployment to Reduce Wildfire Risks School: UC Berkeley California has been experiencing increasingly worsening forest fires that affect millions. The direct cause of many of these forest fires are from power lines being downed by high winds and winds spreading the fire. This model proposes to slow winds by 40 – 50% by deploying wind turbines along the path of the Santa Ana winds in mountain passes. Since the mass of air moving through an area can’t change, converting the kinetic energy of the wind results in a squared reduction in velocity. The solution reduces wind speeds while using the energy for green causes, like using it to power other green technology for on-site use, such as direct carbon capture. This can prevent fires that may result from storing or transporting the energy from the wind farms. By slowing winds, this model can quickly and effectively reduce the forest fires in California, and in the world, fighting the consequences of climate change.
The Mobius Project School: UC Berkeley These days, tech companies constantly have to admit that they are not fully equipped to deal with all of the ways bad actors can use their platforms or technologies to cause harm – and the ways their product can disproportionately harm particular groups of people. The Mobius Project is a knowledge and research platform that provides practical ways to incorporate abusability testing into existing product life cycles and teams, drawing from existing expertise from privacy, security, scholars, and digital activists. This platform is a multi-sided digital marketplace that includes three main features. It will provide abusability bug bounties that provide a forum where verified experts can discuss abusability risks and propose solutions. It will develop fundable tools and frameworks around abusability that can be implemented into various parts of the software development project life cycle. Finally, the Mobius Project will provide a searchable database of potential abuses for product teams in the planning stages.
Tiny Home in My Backyard: A Vehicle for Change School: UC Berkeley The magnitude of the Bay Area’s unsheltered homelessness population, underscored by an absence of temporary shelter options and an insufficient supply of supportive housing, makes the crisis one of the most visible in the nation. To combat the homelessness crisis, this project proposes the construction of solar-powered tiny homes. The homes have the potential to address and scale various components of decarbonized affordable housing units that, in partnership with community organizations and city governments, would serve local homeless populations in need of housing. Though several localities have employed similar interventions, it is imperative that new housing and construction be compliant with renewable energy innovations to mitigate their environmental impact, as building accounts for nearly 40% of global energy-related carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. This project represents an opportunity for students from diverse departments to learn about sustainable design principles through hands-on experience in all phases of development, from design to construction to performance evaluation.
Vigillent Home Fire Protection System School: UC Santa Barbara The technology used to fight against wildfires has evolved, but the technology to reduce risks of structural damage has not. Vigillent Wildfire Protection Systems seeks to save lives, homes, and communities from wildfires by deploying automatically operated, self-contained, and easily installed fire protection systems that are designed to provide families with an affordable last line of fire defense. Vigillent’s systems apply an adequate protective blanket of class environmentally responsible fire retardant on a home’s roof, eaves, ventilation, outer walls, structural lining, and entire defensible space using a self-powered and remotely activated fluid delivery mechanism. Vigillent’s technology is designed through qualitative and quantitative research analysis from market validation interviews, while interpreting relationships between society and global climate change factors that contribute to wildfire tendencies. Vigillent’s technology protects families and their most valuable assets, is verbally supported by fire chiefs, for its ability to decrease risk without increasing liabilities, and provides insurance incentives for attaining Vigillent’s protection.
Walls to Bridges School: UC Santa Cruz Walls to Bridges is a pilot program in partnership with the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz (CRC) designed to address communication issues between incarcerated parents and their adult-age children in Santa Cruz. Using restorative justice practices and principles, the program will facilitate confidential dialogues regarding the impact of incarceration on relationships and planning for communication resolutions, such as letters, phone calls, and visits. The dialogues will take place between incarcerated parents and their adult-age children within a Santa Cruz County jail. The process focuses on the procedural aspect of healing, like what steps need to be taken to address the harm and reduce the adverse outcomes for families impacted by incarceration. A research aspect will inform for potential expansion with the CRC as well as replication for other restorative justice or criminal justice reform organizations. Walls To Bridges has the potential to inform the public of familial incarceration challenges and help make policy recommendations.
Education & Literacy
The challenge for this track is to create innovative solutions that address the underlying barriers to quality education and literacy. Proposals may focus on the design, development or delivery of education and literacy solutions that can be domestic or international in scope. All proposals should clearly demonstrate the relationship between the proposed intervention and its impact on education and literacy.
Green Teach App School: UC Santa Barbara The current environmental crisis has generated a spark of interest and demands by youth, who are demanding solutions as well as more applicable knowledge on how to be better environmental stewards. The Green Teach App will promote international sharing of environmental stewardship approaches designed by K-12 teachers and implemented in their classrooms. It will provide a digital, easy access, and affordable tool for educators interested in covering the academic content dictated by the standards specified by their school’s district or country, while educating students about pressing sustainability issues and current environmental challenges. Green Teach will provide K-12 teachers with a robust database of lesson plans categorized by country, language, grade, core subject, and environmental topic covered. Other tags will include the evaluation mechanisms used for the lesson, any outdoor or indoor hands-on activities or projects done in the lesson, as well as labels for lessons designed for instruction with students with learning disabilities.
Matica: A Social Mathematical Teaching Tool for Improving Learners’ Ability in Numeracy School: Makerere University Mathematics is vital in the development of elementary skills like creativity, problem solving, and innovation, yet many children go through school with little knowledge and skill in the subject. Understanding the subject of mathematics is necessary because it not only drives improved performance in STEM, but also improves general intelligence to solving everyday challenges. Matica is a novel, low-cost mathematics game that improves mathematical learning, critical thinking, and mental work among children in Uganda and other resource-limited countries without proper infrastructure and capital investments to use high-end technologies. Matica allows learners to have fun with mathematics, while they play and interact with their teachers, parents, and peers. It has been designed as an eccentric mathematical social learning tool for learners to improve basic skills in mathematics, arithmetic computations, competencies, and interests through social interaction and playing like other ordinary card games, employing Matica’s mission to provide every child the platform to love and succeed in Mathematics.
OutReach Assistant School: UC Berkeley Higher education in the United States has become less accessible to underserved ethnic minorities, immigrants, and those from more socio-economically distressed communities. While there are many factors that contribute to the cumulative disadvantages in equity within our country, education is among the most evident and consequential. For decades, community colleges have served as a feeder program for those who have aspired for higher education, but have neglected the needs of disadvantaged students due to a lack of effective communication. Today, OutReach Assistant by SIGMA is leveraging the latest technology in data analytics, machine learning, and software development to building and designing scalable and affordable technology that makes it possible for faculty and administrators to better connect with underprivileged students who are otherwise overlooked as well as students who are self starters. This software will set the standard for outreach and engagement across California community colleges as it continues to eliminate achievement gaps in education.
PIC.ME : Personalized Interactive Communication Made for Everyone School: UC Santa Barbara Approximately one third of people with autism are nonverbal, resulting in a rising need for a user-friendly, socio-culturally relevant means of assistive technology to help them communicate. PIC.ME: Personalized Interactive Communication Made for Everyone is an app that can be downloaded onto a personal smart device, such as a smartphone or tablet, for people with exceptional needs, such as autism, or other language disabilities. Users can personalize pictures used for picture exchange communication that are culturally and socially relevant to their lives, record vocalizations for words and sounds to match pictures, and practice language and social skills with games. This app will not be limited to people with autism, but will be accessible for any person living with a disability that causes a loss of the ability to effectively communicate. PIC.ME will not only make assistive technology more available to all, but it will make the right of communication more equitable for all.
University Climate Index School: UC Berkeley Underrepresented minority (URM) students, African-Americans, American Indians/Alaskan Natives, and Hispanics, as defined by the Council of Graduate Schools account for 15% of doctorates awarded by U.S. institutions in 2016. Yet URMs makeup more than 30% of the U.S population. This problem is not detached from our reality at UC Berkeley. This project will create a University Climate Index: a sustainable system for assessing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at academic institutions, starting with UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. The two key components of this idea include a UCI Math Model to interpret DEI data into index that representative departments’ (or institutions’) recruitment and retention of URM students and a UCI Framework that other academic institutions can use as a guide towards computing their own UCI with our Math Model. The goal is to use commonly available data sets that reflect an academic institution’s efforts towards DEI in their environment.
Energy & Resources
The challenge for this track is to encourage the adoption of clean energy and/or resource alternatives that are sustainable and have the potential for broad impact. Proposals may focus on
the design, development or delivery of green energy solutions that can be domestic or international in scope. All proposals should clearly demonstrate the relationship between the proposed intervention and its impact on the environment.
Five Leaf School: UC San Diego While reusing and recycling materials used by clothing brands and manufacturers is necessary to deal with the mass of clothes accumulating in aged inventories, it does not significantly improve environmental footprint. This is because the rate of clothing production and consumption is expected to accelerate. Ultimately, sustainable fashion means less fashion, which contradicts the mainstream business model of producing and consuming more. Five Leaf’s color-changing fabric enables fashion brands to reduce the volume of clothes produced while allowing consumers to reuse their clothes in ways that were previously not possible. This idea will reduce the risk of brands overproducing or overstocking their inventories by introducing a versatile color-changing fabric for the consumers to customize themselves, directly connecting supply with demand. By applying a customer acquisition model, Five Leaf’s clothes are designed to eventually become cost-competitive with fast fashion, while encouraging slower consumerism by extending the life of clothes.
HelioVap School: UC Berkeley Across the 2,700 islands of Indonesia, one in eight households lack clean water access. Traditional desalination technologies have too high energy requirements, costs, and brine discharges to be implemented in these coastal communities. As a result, households often purchase bottled water, which is both expensive and environmentally damaging. HelioVap is a floating, stand-alone desalination device that can provide reliable water access to coastal communities through an off-grid, zero-liquid discharge process that directly uses sunlight to separate seawater into its fundamental components. HelioVap is being designed to produce 75 L of water per day, which should be sufficient to meet the drinking and cooking requirements of five households through the utilization of alternative energy sources including sunlight, wind, and natural temperature gradients. This technology does not threaten biodiversity in the coastal ecosystems that over 50% of the population relies on for income, and the use of alternative energy sources reduces cost and carbon emissions of the process.
Wise Earthcare-Biodegradable Oral Healthcare Products Delivered School: UC Los Angeles Over 1.2 billion plastic toothbrushes are thrown away in the United States every year–enough to fill up 1,100 shipping containers. The problem is that 99% of those toothbrushes are made from plastic that is non-recyclable and they end up in landfills or the ocean, contributing to the increase of pollution. The solution is a toothbrush that is 100% biodegradable, clinically validated by the American Dental Association, which is delivered directly to the consumer via subscription, retail, and dental offices. These products will be both clinically effective and sustainable and will include an array of oral care products, including toothbrushes for adults and kids, electric toothbrush replacement heads, floss, floss picks, toothpaste, and mouthwash. With validation from the ADA and both dentists and consumers regarding the design, this product can ensure that patients/users are receiving the best possible oral healthcare products, while still playing a positive role in the sustainability movement.
Financial Inclusion
The challenge for this track is to propose novel products, services, tools or mechanisms that either address unmet needs of the financially underserved, or help extend existing services to populations at the unbanked “last mile.”
FairMed School: UC San Diego Due to the lack of transparency and the absence of price regulations in the U.S., medical supply and pharmaceutical companies are increasingly exploiting this imbalance of information and lack of regulations to jack up the prices for their products, making the cost for basic healthcare needs unaffordable for patients. FairMed is an internet platform that optimizes the supply chain for clinics to both obtain better pricing and streamline their restocking procedures. The platform uses an algorithm to determine the optimal way to form an aggregated order, while not violating products’ designated restock deadlines. This platform both reduces the cost of resupplying and the administration effort for the clinics. Using the profit and cash flow generated by the platform, FairMed reimburses patients a percentage of their medical bills when visiting FairMed associated clinics. Such practice brings in more customers and further incentivizes the clinics to use FairMed and thus creates a positive feedback loop.
Legacy School: UC Berkeley Modern-day student loans fail to align with the interests of the students and many people incurring their massive student debt are never going to be able to get out from under the weight of these bills. Having gained popularity only recently, Income Share Agreements (ISA) attempt to resolve this problem by tying the future earning potential of the student post-graduation to the people tasked with helping the student succeed. Legacy, is a peer-to-peer lending platform, where an investor called a “legatus” can enter into ISAs called with their “legacies.” Named after the Roman practice of providing philanthropic opportunities to their high achieving youth, Legacy will help foster talent that otherwise would’ve gone overlooked. Legacy aims to broaden the reach of ISAs to more people by providing a peer-to-peer platform where industry professionals can connect and support younger versions of themselves from their alma mater.
Lyzapay School: Makerere University Youth in Uganda start business ventures with little or no knowledge of financial management or good business practices and with limited access to capital. About 50% of this population has little or no assets to put up for collateral for loans and they do not come from rich families to get capital. Without these resources, businesses are bound to fail, resulting in a vicious cycle of youth unemployment, food insecurity, and under performance of the economy. Lyzapay is a mobile application platform that gives both financial literacy and access to capital to business owners in Uganda. The application analyzes the entrepreneur’s personal data, business financial records, assets, and financial literacy to compute a credit score. This is integrated with a financial advisory platform that has a series of customized training modules and tools tailored to suit the Ugandan setting. Lyzapay will enhance the local entrepreneurs’ knowledge of financial management and good business practices.
RoboCash School: UC Irvine Data shows that anti-spam laws and apps have not slowed the increasing trend of spam calls. This is because these anti-spam attempts are addressing the symptoms (spam techniques) and not the cause (financial incentives). RoboCash’s vision is to end all robocalls and spam, by addressing the economic incentives that drive every scam call. RoboCash’s proprietary method places “cash-back” options on both sides of a phone call and works in a user-friendly way by rejecting all unknown numbers unless they leave a five cent “NanoDeposit.” Unknown callers get the NanoDeposit back if their call lasts more than 25 seconds or if the user doesn’t pick up. Otherwise, if the user hears the usual scam language and hangs up before 25 seconds, they collect their NanoDeposit. RoboCash’s vision is to provide value to telemarketers and users as a middleman with a disruptive business model that distributes the profits amongst everybody involved.
Food & Agriculture
The challenge for this track is to encourage the development of innovative solutions or approaches
that address complex challenges in food systems and agricultural development. Proposals submitted to this track may focus on areas such as enhancing agricultural production, increasing
food security, promoting sustainable farming practices, and/or creating equitable access to nutritious food. Proposals may be aimed at campus-based programs, local/domestic issues, or international efforts.
BioMilitus School: UC Davis Agricultural co-products and other food wastes are used as feedstock for insects, which are later harvested for biomass, rich in proteins and fats valued as animal feed ingredient. Consequently, the bioconverted food waste is transformed into a microbially active insect compost known as frass, which may be used as a soil amendment for crops. Given that 3 million tons of organic waste are generated each year from California alone, this resource represents a significant opportunity for insect bioconversion. BioMilitus leverages the bioconversion potential of black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) as a solution for bridging the gap between the increasing global food demand and abundant organic waste. In order to realize the idea’s full potential, BioMilitus has further innovated this process through the engineering of growing conditions, specialized blends of wastes used as feed stock, and specially bred lines of insect larvae targeted for more efficient bioconversion of waste.
EatLink School: UC Irvine Currently, over a third of all food produced in Africa is lost post-harvest, approximately enough to feed a total of 48 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to greater imports of food that cripple local farmers. While some companies try to combat this loss by providing more storage units, their efforts are too slow and too costly to scale around Africa. EatLink serves to tackle this issue with a monitoring device that detects when and where food spoils. The location data can pinpoint the locations during food transport and discover where the cracks in the harvest-to-store pipeline occur to prevent future losses in the same places. The device itself is cost effective and easy to operate and install, allowing unprecedented growth and results over a brief period of time during its initial implementation. Through the use of big data analytics, EatLink serves to preserve food lost in transport and revitalize the African agricultural economy.
Faba Friends School: UC Davis Chickpeas have become a popular source of plant-based protein, reflected by an increased focus on sustainability and veganism. Despite chickpeas being a more sustainable source of protein compared to meat, it leaves behind a valuable functional ingredient: aquafaba, which is the water that remains after cooking chickpeas. While aquafaba is perceived as a waste stream by most of the food industry, this wastewater can be upcycled into unique products. Faba Friends is a frozen dessert bar filled with a creamy, aquafaba “ice cream” and coated in chocolate. Similar to a chocolate bar, Faba Friends can be broken into smaller bite-sized pieces and shared among friends and family. The frozen dessert bar can be consumed as is, or blended to create a protein packed smoothie. This is the first frozen dessert that utilizes upcycled aquafaba as its primary ingredient. By turning a waste stream into a value-added product, Faba Friends offers a delicious, sustainable, protein-packed frozen treat.
FootMo Kit School: Makerere University Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the world’s fastest growing human populations. The expansion of the livestock population is necessary to address this population growth, however the output depends critically on livestock productivity, which is generally poor across the region’s various production systems. Currently, 25% of livestock in sub-Saharan Africa die due to highly contagious and viral Foot and Mouth disease and 65% of this livestock in Uganda is predominantly cattle. FootMo Kit is a hand-held device that detects Foot and Mouth Disease in livestock in hard-to-reach and under-served areas through early disease detection. The kit is simple to use and is a low-cost device that is put in the mouths of a cattle that detects the disease against the antigen content in the saliva. FootMo Kit addresses poverty, well-being, and sustainable development, as well as empowers farmers to detect diseases without relying on the veterinary doctors.
Sundial Foods, Inc. School: UC Berkeley Meat consumption in the United States has risen in recent years, and despite a variety of activism efforts, the trend shows little sign of slowing down. The alternative meats industry seeks to provide sustainable alternatives to meat in order to provide the experience of meat consumption without the environmental cost; however, current products are expensive, highly processed, and rarely healthy. Sundial Foods’ mission is to alleviate the global environmental and public health burden of concentrated animal agriculture. Sundial Foods is revolutionizing the alternative meat industry by developing a new method for the creation of these products that relies upon a biological approach to meat structure in order to inform the creation of a product that looks, cooks, and tastes like animal chicken. The processing method in development is significantly more efficient than the methods currently used in the alternative meat industry, and makes use of whole plant ingredients rather than micronutrient-depleted protein isolates.
Suppression of Evaporation and Percolation Water Losses with Novel Infiltration Insert Method to Improve Plant Yield Utilizing Carbon Sequestration School: UC Santa Barbara Increasing global population requires 70% more food production by 2050, predominantly cultivated in developing countries and areas with an arid climate. Irrigation consumes more than 80% of the world’s fresh water. Traditional irrigation practices suffer from evaporation and percolation loss of freshwater and existing efficient technologies are very expensive and not economically viable for developing world. The purpose of this innovation is to develop and implement an economically viable technique and devices to reduce irrigation water loss and apply them to micro-irrigation to help small farm owners in the developing world. The proposed infiltration system inserts under drip emitters mimic SDI and delivers water to the root zone. Then engineered perlite/peat-moss topsoil beds suppresses evaporation loss by locking water in the pores and a percolation control layer at the root zone uses charcoal amendment to retain water and improve root health/plant yield, ultimately working to reduce the water footprint of agriculture in arid regions.
Global Health
The challenge for this track is to describe an intervention that would alleviate a global health concern, either domestically or internationally. Proposals submitted to this track should (a) demonstrate evidence of a widespread health concern faced by resource-constrained populations, and (b) develop a system, program, or technology that is culturally appropriate within the target communities and designed for low-resource settings.
AIDS-Tech: A point of care test for HIV drug resistance testing School: Makerere University The broader access to antiretroviral drugs has led not only to considerable reductions in morbidity and mortality but, unfortunately, has increased the risk of virologic failure due to emergence and potential transmission of drug-resistant viruses. AIDS-tech will be a portable point of care diagnostic test that detects HIV drug resistance mutations in patient blood samples within 120 minutes, with an estimated sensitivity of 80-90% at an estimated cost of $50. A rechargeable battery (8-hour half-life) will be fitted to support a full day’s testing to use in field settings where access to electricity is limited. Results will be interpreted with a naked eye (observing color change on the strips), hence eliminating the need for computers and software. This will aid timely acquisition of resistance results and guide clinicians on which regime to start the patient and thus improve treatment outcome. It will also aid in the World Health Organization’s target to limit the number of patients with HIV.
ChemCath: A Real-time Intravascular Chemical Monitor School: UC Berkeley Real-time, continuous monitoring of patient health is of utmost importance to detect life-threatening problems in a timely manner. Currently doctors rely on patient symptoms or blood draws to detect physiological imbalances organ injury. However, these imbalances and injuries can occur quickly and failing to respond to these in a timely manner can lead to significant deterioration of a patient’s health. ChemCath is a sensor-embedded modification of a current catheter that will enable early identification of these deleterious events by continuously collecting physiologic and chemical data. Leveraging recent advances in micro- and nano-science, ChemCath’s biosensors will quickly detect changes in pH to start, but future work will facilitate measurement of other important biomarkers such as sodium, potassium, and glucose. ChemCath will also pave the way for close at-home monitoring of patients on home health, preferentially benefiting the elderly, disabled, and those in rural communities who have a more difficult finding access to healthcare facilities.
Gastro-Bag Project School: Makerere University The mortality rate for neonates in Uganda with Gastroschisis is 98% compared to high-income countries with less than 4%. Gastroschisis is a congenital anomaly birth defect in which abdominal organs protrude through a small opening right of the umbilical cord. The difference in the survival rate between low-income countries and high-income countries is largely caused by failure to keep the neonates hydrated, nourished, and infection-free while their bowel is outside the abdomen. This is because silo-bags used to put the bowel back into the baby’s abdomen cost approximately $240 which is 140% of the average monthly income in Uganda. The Gastro-Bag Project has developed and tested a low-cost silo-bag for treatment and management of Gastroschisis using locally available materials in Uganda at a cost of less than $5. The Gastro-Bag Project intends to demonstrate feasibility and improvements in quality, efficacy, operability, costs, and accessibility of Gastroschisis to improve human health.
Mabinju Borehole Project School: UC Davis In the community of Mabinju, Kenya, 3,500 people have limited access to clean water for agriculture and basic needs. Lake Victoria, the main water source in Siaya county where Mabinju is located, is infested with water hyacinth and contaminated with fluoride and traces of copper (II) and zinc (III), which cause rapid spread of disease throughout the region. The Mabingu Borehole Project will address the lack of accessible clean water in the region by installing a borehole that uses a solar-powered pump to extract groundwater. The project aims to provide enough potable water for the community’s needs. With this accessibility, the residents will no longer have to rely on polluted, stagnant water from Lake Victoria. The rate of water-borne illnesses, such as cholera and dysentery, will decrease and the community’s income and food, which relies substantially on their agriculture, will further thrive with an abundance of clean and accessible water.
Mobile Based Stroke Rehabilitation: NeoMotion AI School: UC Berkeley Stroke rehabilitation is often inaccessible, expensive, and requires a lot of scarce, highly trained professionals. By harnessing the processing power of smartphones in combination with recent advances in artificial intelligence, NeoMotion AI will be able to improve rehabilitation at a worldwide scale. NeoMotion AI is run on AI-based pose estimation algorithms and it optimizes them for usage on smartphones without internet connection. Using a smartphone camera and this software, the solution involves tracking the coordinates of every joint of the upper and lower limbs, proving patients, rehabilitation specialists, and physicians with a tool to track patient’s rehabilitation progress over time. At a later stage, performing rehabilitation exercises in front of a smartphone would allow patients to receive personalized exercise corrections or new and adaptive exercises suggestions. NeoMotion AI can provide an engaging rehabilitation experience for stroke patients through a social platform, creating a sense of community, and a more integrated management system for physical therapists or physicians.
Smoke reducing Clay 3-D Printed Stove School: UC Berkeley According to the World Health Program, more than three billion of the world’s population do not have access to clean cooking facilities and still rely on solid fuels such as wood, animal dung, charcoal, crop wastes, and coal for cooking and heating. These fuels are burned in extremely inefficient and highly polluting stoves and one of the world’s greatest environmental health risk factors is exposure to the emissions from these cooking stoves. This project proposes a new mechanism of self-generated air flow that boosts combustion and helps neutralize smoke. The proposed 3D printed clay stove is a doubly walled enclosure with a hollow in between, incorporating built-in apertures at the base of the exterior wall and at the top of the interior wall. The stove could be manufactured locally on-site using clay that is almost free and available anywhere. The stove capitalizes on additive manufacturing technology to leverage local material into high performing micro-infrastructure that offsets environmental and economic costs.
The Automated Ambu Bag System, AABS School: Makerere University There is a dire need to invest in intermediate care bridging from the resuscitative efforts in the Emergency Units and the supportive care offered by the intensive care units in Uganda. This leads to a high prevalence of missed opportunities for patients requiring advanced ventilatory support at Emergency Units. This is due to there being only 33 Intensive Care beds with Mechanical Ventilators for the whole population of Uganda. The Automated Ambu BagSystem (AABS) is automated and designed to provide controlled ventilatory support to patients with respiratory failure. The project is aimed at utilising the existing and relatively affordable bagging technology proving vital features of an Advanced Ventilatory Support System. The principle of the bag is through the compression of the Ambu Bag, which uses a piston run by a mortar. The device is light and of medium size, which allows it to be easily moved to different bed stations without it being stolen.
The Rescue Cot School: Makerere University According to Uganda Road Sector Support Initiative, Uganda has the second highest rate of road traffic accidents in Africa and the world after Ethiopia. The transportation and rescue services at the accident scenes are inadequate and inappropriate and the Uganda Police, which is the main emergency rescue team in the country, often lacks assistive devices at accident scenes. This means that emergency responders have to lift and carry the victims by hand to their vehicles. A big gap thus remains for evacuation of casualties from scenes of accidents on Ugandan roads. The Rescue Cot will contribute to improving patient safety through reduction of body movements and detecting the patient’s critical condition. This low-cost stretcher will be 3-folded portable pole evacuation resource that includes metallic rods with two hinge joints, cloth, straps, caster wheels, and a pulse-oximeter, which can measure the patient’s critical condition by detecting the heart rate and oxygen saturation of the patient.
Workforce Development
This category challenges students to develop solutions to assist those who will be adversely affected and displaced by advancements in technology, automation, and artificial intelligence. To this end, students will be required to think about the issue critically and understand the exact nature of jobs that will be displaced. The matter at hand is to help these workers regain not only their lost income but also their purpose and direction in life.
Riverside Studios Entertainment Innovation Incubator School: UC Riverside The Entertainment industry is rapidly changing due to the emergence of new technologies, creating a need for skilled labor in areas such as marketing, data analytics, software engineering, and VR/AR development. Despite this technology shift, students have traditionally lacked the training and skills crucial for entering the entertainment industry, creating a larger gap in entertainment workforce development, and thus, economic growth. The Riverside Studios Entertainment Innovation Incubator provides a large space that includes recording studios, film studios, work rooms, equipment, and performance stages. This would be coupled with educational training opportunities, mentorship, project development, marketing, events, and funding to help propel student ideas into tangible products or services. This incubator program solves a major issue in workforce development and education for the Entertainment industry and provides new opportunities for students to succeed in the entertainment world
Signum School: UC Berkeley Unemployment and underemployment are problems that affect roughly 70% of all Americans with hearing impairments. Signum is a video chat platform created to solve this problem. Designed as a workforce development tool, Signum utilizes a machine learning model to translate video of ASL gestures to text, easing communication for people with hearing and speech impairments who can only communicate in ASL. Although several other startups are currently developing similar technologies, Signum distinguishes a gap in the market due to its emphasis on providing an inexpensive and non-intrusive means of communication targeted towards removing barriers in the workplace. Signum’s current target market is “functionally deaf” ASL users in the workforce between 18- and 35-years old. In the long term, Signum will be used in conjunction with popular workforce video chat platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Cisco WebEx to expand to a broader audience and impact millions of lives.
Sike Insights School: UC Los Angeles The world is clearly moving towards increasingly remote employment, especially since housing costs continue to rise in large cities. Remote work is clearly a part of the future of work, but there are still major hurdles to be overcome before remote work can replace in-person work. Remote teams are often less effective, because teammates don’t have strong working relationships with each other. Sike Insights aims to eliminate the difference between remote and in-person work. Its solution is an AI-powered Slackbot that helps remote teams work better together by improving communication. This bot, named Kona, uses deep learning to analyze the way each team member communicates within Slack. It then smartly delivers actionable insights about how remote team members should interact with each other. This will help teams communicate effectively, work through conflicts, and feel more engaged with the team, ultimately improving how teams communicate while working remotely.
Aboubacar Komara, founder and president of Kaloum Bankhi, says his upbringing in both Guinea and the United States has shaped how he understands architecture.
How Kaloum Bankhi Builds Homes with Low-income Communities in Guinea
By Emily Denny
Aboubacar Komara, founder and president of Kaloum Bankhi, says his upbringing in both Guinea and the United States has shaped how he understands architecture.
Matt Turlock and Aboubacar Komara won first place in the Big Ideas Contest in 2019 for their innovative approach to architecture in low-income communities.
Born in Guinea, Komara moved to the U.S. in 2013 and graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in architecture in 2018. Komara explains that the combination of cultural values from both countries inspired the mission behind Kaloum Bankhi–a registered NGO in Guinea that maximizes existing and limited housing space for people in the slums of Kaloum, located within the capital city of Conakry.
The Kaloum Bankhi team incorporates the local identity into its designs is by including African prints as a design element in its renovations.
“I don’t think this project would be possible without Aboubacar and the ways he brings his cultural experiences and architecture together,” said Matt Turlock, a 2019 graduate of UC Berkeley master’s programs in architecture and structural engineering and a Kaloum Bankhi team lead.
In 2019, Kaloum Bankhi won first place in the Big Ideas Contest for its process-focused design to maximize existing spaces by co-designing with residents and providing building skills. Big Ideas Mentor Jason Moses, founder and director of CommonThread.com–a social enterprise improving slum conditions and upgrading informal settlements worldwide– inspired the Kaloum Bankhi team to build their mission statement and understand architecture as “art that brings social change.”
“The communities are the ones dealing with these problems and we believe that the real solutions come from them,” said Komara of his organization’s collaborative approach, which includes incorporating the community into the design and building process and teaching people how to build their own self-sustaining structures.
Currently, many residents of Kaloum live in insufficient living spaces with poor sanitation. Among Kaloum Bankhi’s aims is to maximize existing space by adding movable walls and features within newly constructed homes.
Komara credits his education at UC Berkeley for teaching him how to ask “Why?”–why, in this case, some communities reside in inadequate housing and architectural solutions are out of reach. He also credits his personal ties to the region for stressing the necessity of a bottom-up approach for community development, with a strong focus on culture and identity.
The Kaloum Bankhi’s housing prototype is built with a process-focused design to maximize existing spaces by co-designing with residents and providing building skills.
One way Kaloum Bankhi incorporates local identity into its designs is by including African prints as a design element in its renovations. After building the first prototype, Komara and Turlock learned that including familiar patterns into the walls of the homes led community members to see them as “not something that was imposed on them, but rather a part of their own culture,” said Komara.
The Kaloum Bankhi team, located in Kaloum, also helps equip local community members with the skills to build the homes. “We want the communities to come away with not just new shelter and a durable home, but the skills to keep building in a community,” said Turlock.
Since 2018, Kaloum Bankhi has built two prototype structures, the first in Kissosso and the second in Kaloum, both neighborhoods in Conakry. By spring 2020 the team hopes to have begun retrofit of four households, with further homes to follow. However, throughout their prototyping, the team has adapted approaches and plans to gain approval from the community. For example, Kaloum Bankhi is aiming to use only recycled materials, hoping to renovate with wood, but wood is an unfamiliar material to Kaloum locals who traditionally use concrete and cement bricks.
“Culturally people don’t feel safe in wood. So one thing we have been working on is how to make people trust the kind of building we are doing,” said Komara.
The members of the Kaloum Bankhi NGO, based in Guinea, meet with local leaders to discuss their participation in Kaloum Bankhi’s mission.
Gaining the trust of community members through connections with local leaders has been essential to Kaloum Bankhi’s progress. Before meeting with the local leaders, the Kaloum Bankhi team had ambitious plans to renovate homes in four different localities of Kaloum’s 13 different neighborhoods. However, after meeting with the leaders, they were advised to focus their construction on just one community, to make a more visible and convincing impact for locals.
The Kaloum Bankhi team aims to apply its sustainable building and community processes to other regions of Guinea and internationally with the intent to benefit marginalized and vulnerable communities. Komara and Turlock have been working on a project in another region of Guinea to expand a school to hold more students, and they are working on an amphitheater project for community gatherings in Los Angeles with The WOW Flower Project.
“Our concept is to become a social enterprise that uses architecture to bring social change to disadvantaged areas,” said Turlock.
Innovation Ambassadors are highly motivated students who have a keen interest in social entrepreneurship and want to support Big Ideas’ mission to help this generation of students develop social impact projects. Below are interviews with four current Innovation Ambassadors.
By Lisa Bauer
Founded in 2005 at UC Berkeley, Big Ideas has become one of the largest and most diverse student innovation competitions in the country. The contest supports the next generation of social entrepreneurs–providing mentorship, training, and the diverse resources required to support big ideas from their earliest stages. In 2017, to ensure the contest remains accessible to the widest number of students across UC’s ten campuses, the Big Ideas team designed an Innovation Ambassador program.
Innovation Ambassadors are highly motivated students who have a keen interest in social entrepreneurship and want to support Big Ideas’ mission to help this generation of students develop social impact projects that matter to them. Innovation Ambassadors are responsible for Big Ideas outreach, event organization, advising, and research on their campus. Ultimately, they help aspiring student entrepreneurs transform their ideas into viable ventures. Below are interviews with four current Innovation Ambassadors.
Mekdem Wright Mekdem Wright is an MBA candidate at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management and a social entrepreneur/intrapreneur.
How do you see the future of social innovation and entrepreneurship?
The future of social innovation and entrepreneurship is all about networks. Today, resources and assets–people, institutions, technology, infrastructure, and information–are in some contexts becoming increasingly centralized, consolidated, or concentrated, while in other contexts they are becoming increasingly decentralized, distributed, or modularized. We are seeing accelerated technological advancements and globalization, and our world is becoming increasingly complex and interdependent.
With all of that, comes opportunities. We have powerful new tools and capabilities that, if leveraged effectively, will enable us to achieve heightened levels of efficiency and productivity. If those resources and assets can be properly arranged into a healthy ecosystem, they can act as catalysts to move beyond incremental change and activate exponential change.
That requires social entrepreneurs, and the organizations in which they are working, to foster relationships, establish partnerships, and build coalitions across sectors, industries, and disciplines to engage all stakeholders in pre-competitive collaboration and cooperation, share learnings, and standardize best practices. It requires building the foundations and structures for networks to emerge, grow, and thrive, and developing models and frameworks within which to organize and coordinate activities. The solutions to most challenges lie in the collective knowledge of our global community. Solving the big, wicked problems of today requires stakeholders to break down silos, provide open access to information, connect, and engage–they are too urgent to double efforts and keep reinventing the wheel.
How does participating in Big Ideas affect students’ professional development?
Lectures and classroom exercises just can’t compare to this sort of hands-on, “learn-by-doing” experience–something I think we need much more of in our education system. Social entrepreneurship contests like this teach students much more than just how to start their own venture. They teach relevant, practical skills like critical thinking, research skills, analytical problem-solving, articulate communication, interdisciplinary collaboration, and leadership–all necessary for any professional. They foster confidence and intrinsic motivation. They bring like-minded students together to work on a self-guided project, which they get to define, design, and manage themselves. In today’s increasingly uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, we should train students in an environment that is similarly so.
UC Davis is a powerhouse for producing cutting-edge research and high-caliber students in the science and engineering disciplines. There are a wealth of ideas born here with great potential for positive impact. Contests like Big Ideas help students to build their own capacity to bring those ideas to life and reach their full potential.
What has been your most interesting experience as an Innovation Ambassador?
My favorite part of being an Innovation Ambassador was getting to interact with so many smart, passionate individuals and support them in their ideas. Getting a big-picture view of the entire network of innovators on the UC Davis campus was also eye-opening and inspiring.
Thomas Lenihan Thomas Lenihan is a junior studying biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara.
What drew you to Big Ideas and being an Innovation Ambassador?
One of my close friends introduced me to Big Ideas several years ago. I was initially attracted by the program’s accessibility for students without much experience with entrepreneurship or social impact. Big Ideas helped me hone my ideas and focus in on an area where I could make an impact, and provided a new learning experience. Similarly, the Innovation Ambassador role was unfamiliar territory for me, but this uncertainty made the position all the more rewarding as I learned effective strategies to connect with and engage other passionate, forward-thinking students on my home campus.
What are society’s most pressing challenges and solutions?
The threat of climate change will bring with it a host of negative impacts on human societies. However, I also see current patterns of human consumption–from the ubiquity of planet-clogging plastics to the devastation of terrestrial and marine ecosystems as we log, mine, and harvest unsustainable surpluses–as the more pressing problem of our time. There is much work for entrepreneurs to do when it comes to diverting and restructuring this damaging pipeline of extraction to production to consumption to waste, and I believe the most effective products and programs are implemented on scales small enough for Big Ideas to have a significant impact. The mantra of thinking globally and acting locally is an important one: the primary way for businesses and consumers to reduce their carbon footprint is to ensure they know from where, and how far, the raw materials for their products are traveling. Ultimately, we must drastically reduce our natural resource consumption, both on an individual and societal level, and this cannot be done without alternative products and services, which are created with this goal in mind.
At UC Santa Barbara, what are some of the social issues students are exploring?
Our proximity to the ocean has a pull on many students, and a lot of prospective applicants want to address social problems that are in some way related to water. It was interesting to see among the Big Ideas proposals how many of the students gained their initial inspiration from ocean ecosystems or the human communities that relied on them. One thing you can get everyone to agree on is that our ocean is an invaluable resource, and it deserves protection. For many people, this means finding ways to minimize human impact on this environment.
Amy Lui Amy Lui is a graduate student at UC San Diego earning a Master in Biology. She is the founder and CEO of Partners in Life, which uses mobile technology to connect pregnant women to doulas.
What excites you most about being a Big Ideas Innovation Ambassador?
I started my own social venture, Partners in Life, because I noticed while serving as a volunteer doula at UC San Diego Health System that many expecting mothers weren’t getting doulas despite requesting them. I also discovered that this situation disproportionately affected disadvantaged mothers. This led me to try to find a way to connect mothers to doulas. I discovered Big Ideas in founding Partners in Life. Being an Innovation Ambassador has allowed me to be more involved with the campus entrepreneurial ecosystem and meet other like-minded individuals. I have also also able to connect with different networks on campus, and expand Partners in Life to rural villages in Nigeria and China.
What are some challenges that students face in innovation contests?
Telling a good narrative. Some students have difficulty cohesively expressing their ideas and sometimes that overwhelms them. This can discourage a lot of students from applying. Attending storytelling classes really helps; I highly recommended my students attend the workshop held by Big Ideas.
What’s the most valuable experience you’ve had as an Innovation Ambassador?
My most valuable experience was interacting and being more involved with the advisors, staff, and administration at UCSD. Through them, I was able to spread awareness of Big Ideas on campus, reach out to many students, and make our community more aware of social impact ideas.
Parul Wadhwa Parul Wadhwa is a MFA Digital Arts and New Media student at UC Santa Cruz. She has been a Big Ideas finalist twice, in 2017 and now in the 2018-2019 round.
What drew you to Big Ideas and being an Innovation Ambassador?
I was moving from art to social entrepreneurship when I came across Big Ideas. My social venture was a finalist in 2017, and I learned about the contest through that opportunity. Big Ideas’ mission and scope has aligned with personal trajectory as an artist and entrepreneur, and that was a huge draw for me to take on the Innovation Ambassador role. As an IA, it’s been exciting to connect with budding UCSC entrepreneurs and hear bright ideas for social impact.
What ideas and issues particularly attract UCSC students?
Many UCSC students are interested in art and social change. I’ve also noticed an increasing number of students interested in technology innovations due to UCSC’s proximity to Silicon Valley and its influence on the new wave of students.
What’s the most valuable experience you have had as an Innovation Ambassador?
My most valuable experience was working with and learning directly from Big Ideas Director Phillip Denny. I was able to strategize my role effectively and make sure students leverage the contest’s opportunities. The experience nurtured my interest in advising and mentoring undergraduates for social entrepreneurial paths. I’m grateful for this learning.
On February 26, 2018, Maria Artunduaga had a eureka moment that medical entrepreneurs dream of. In the office of UCSF Professor Mehrdad Arjomandi, she was soliciting advice about a wearable prototype she had developed to monitor oxygen in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
By Tamara Straus
On February 26, 2018, Maria Artunduaga had a eureka moment that medical entrepreneurs dream of. In the office of UCSF Professor Mehrdad Arjomandi, she was soliciting advice about a wearable prototype she had developed to monitor oxygen in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Dr. Arjomandi—a clinical professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Immunology, and Sleep Medicine and a foremost expert on COPD—was telling her about an air trapping investigation he had been doing for over a decade. He was bemoaning the enormous time and expense involved in testing patients with COPD, the third leading cause of U.S. deaths.
Maria Artunduaga
Artunduaga knew these problems intimately. Her grandmother had died of COPD in 2013—and over the past decade, the 38-year-old from Colombia had earned a MD, a Harvard postdoc, a Master in Public Health, and a Master in Translational Medicine and had been obsessively trying to figure out a cost-saving device for the 328 million people worldwide suffering from the lung disease.
“Dr. Arjomandi was talking about air trapping, when patients can’t exhale, and how air changes. It made me think about basic physics, literally,” said Artunduaga. “If you remember, when you are emitting energy either through light or air or water, it changes its characteristics because you have more or less of the medium. In the same sense, if you have more air or less air, the acoustic resonance, the wave energy, is going to change. All the sudden, I realized you could assess trapped air with wearables.”
Artunduaga grabbed her phone and called her husband, Ricardo Garcia, who works as a technical lead on the Sound Amplifier project at Google. For years, she has been watching him probing phones for sound and experimenting with microphones, audio equipment, and the like.
“I said to Ricardo, ‘I know you can use your phone’s microphone to capture sounds and signals. But are you able to capture exhaling and inhaling?’ I breathed in and out. He confirmed the resonance was captured. It was a eureka moment.”
Since that time, Artunduaga has been in marathon startup mode. She pivoted her first COPD project, called KnO2 Sensor (which won third place in the 2017 Big Ideas Global Health category) from being a low-cost monitoring and evaluation wrist device targeted to Latin America—to a COPD solution that would be rolled out first in the United States. Artunduaga explains that the current methods for tracking respiratory disease are Spirometry and Pulse-oximetry, both patient-initiated interventions. They do provide data at discrete points when a patient uses the equipment; yet they often lead to delays in identifying lung function decline in real time. And this lack of timely information often results in expensive hospitalizations from late detection. Artunduaga’s startup, called Respira Labs, relies on a wearable technology that provides continuous monitoring to patients and doctors by detecting the trapped air in the lungs associated with COPD. The invention is very much of the moment: it relies on low-cost audio sensors paired with AI algorithms on a smartphone platform that models and track the lungs’ resonant frequency, flagging any changes in lung function. According to Artunduaga, no one has ever tried to use sound to measure lung resonance entropy. Indeed, Respira’s Freedom to Operate patent analysis performed by UC Hastings College of Law found no similar patents over the past 10 to 20 years for air trapping measurement with sound. Respira filed two provisional patents, in April and November, 2018.
To develop the idea and find funding for it, Artunduaga has been on an innovation contest tear. Respira Labs has been invited to four national innovation challenges, and chosen for Skydeck HotDesk and CITRIS Foundry Founder-in-Residence programs as well as the Y Combinator StartUp School. Respira also was awarded two grants of $25,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and VentureWell in June and December 2018 to further customer research. Also in December, Respira was selected to move on to the U.S.-West regional finals in 2019 Global Social Venture Competition and the finals in the 2019 Big Ideas Contest in the Hardware for Good category.
Some of this funding has allowed Artunduaga and her team to interview over 200 people—patients, doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, regulatory and healthcare business experts, medical device entrepreneurs, and investors—to ensure the device meets both patient needs and medical industry demands.
“We spent one hour with each patient,” said Artunduaga. “They had so much to teach us about how their life goes and their medical needs. Many don’t get the testing they need, because they can’t afford the testing and physician visits.”
She added: “The scientific method is very important when you are building a company. People ask me how I’ve been making this work in 10 months. I say, ‘This is science applied to business. You need to ask what is your hypothesis and have a plan for how you are testing your ideas and overriding biases. In 2016, I was so in love with the promise of a patch that was flexible, but in the end after I finished 100 interviews, I realized the technology needed to be different.”
Likewise, Artunduaga’s initial ambition to introduce a COPD solution for the Latin American market got revised after rounds of interviews and research and field visits. One problem was the regulatory environment; according to Artunduaga, most Latin American medical systems are 10 years behind in terms of having the regulatory infrastructure to introduce digital health products. The other problem was funding. Artunduaga says she first believed the best way to address global public health issues was through academia and the public sector. But she soon realized that limited funding to those sectors cripples and delays projects that have the chance for large impact.
Respira’s aim is to target all 700,000 COPD U.S. patients who are hospitalized every year by their physicians. The team, which includes Haas MBA students Nikhil Chacko and Nerjada Maksutaj, has investigated time into market research. They estimate that COPD costs the U.S. healthcare system nearly $72 billion a year—and half of that cost is attributed to emergency room visits and hospitalization. Because COPD is on the rise as a leading cause of death in the U.S. (it increased 44 percent from 1990 to 2015, they believe early detection could reduce the $36 billion currently spent on emergency room and hospital visits. Artunduaga says Respira’s next big challenges are to validate the acoustic lung resonance measurement, refine the sensor design and the long-term data capture using a mobile device application, and explore machine learning data analysis and prediction. Her team —which is mostly Latinx and half women— includes a mix of seasoned consultants and advisors: Ricardo Garcia, an MIT-trained engineer with 20 years of experience in audio sciences and data signal processing, is the lead advisor for technology development; Santiago Alfaro, an MIT-trained industrial designer with 10 years of experience, is working in wearable design and prototyping; Leonardo Perez, a EU-trained PhD in Mechatronics who is developing the sensing technology; Haas MBA students Nikhil Chacko and Nerjada Maksutaj are leading market research, business development, and fundraising strategies; Selene Mota, an MIT-trained Lemelson Inventor’s Fellow, is the lead advisor on user-centered wearable design; and Luis Serrano, a University of Michigan-trained mathematician, who leads Udacity Artificial Intelligence & Data Science teams, is helping develop the Machine Learning algorithms.
Asked about the significance of being a “minority” founder, Artunduaga is characteristically upbeat and straightforward. “I’m an immigrant, a woman, and a Latina—a triple minority—so I’m always proving myself to other people. That’s the challenge I face every day. But I know I can make things happen. In the past, I managed to build the world’s largest microtia DNA bank, publish in Nature and the NEJM, and become the first female international graduate from Latin America to match into a plastic surgery residency. But I’m not a genius. I’m just very stubborn. If somebody tells me no, I just ask for feedback and I keep looking for opportunities until I make it work.” Although she comes from a family of physicians —her mother is an ENT surgeon, her father is an anesthesiologist, and her sister is a pediatric cardiac and MSK radiologist—Artunduaga says they consider her choice to be a medical entrepreneur unconventional, because for them, a doctor should be doing clinical work and seeing patients. Yet Artunduaga’s multiple prizes, fellowships and awards—as well as her recent selection as Entrepreneur of the Year in Silicon Valley—is quieting their criticism somewhat.
Artunduaga seems not to be terribly concerned. She is in a race against time and for funding. And she is not afraid to ask questions and make connections.
“Everything here is about connecting with people,” said Artunduaga. “In Silicon Valley, things happen five times faster than any other geography. Yet the culture is amazing. If you have a good idea, you can get 20 minutes with CEOs, founders, regulatory experts, or lawyers. People are willing to help you, if they believe in your idea.”
Early years of childhood form the basis of intelligence, personality, social behavior, and capacity to learn and nurture oneself. Increasingly, child development researchers are also finding that brain development during the first eight years is the most rapid, with children who receive attention in their early years
By Veena Narashiman ’2020
Early years of childhood form the basis of intelligence, personality, social behavior, and capacity to learn and nurture oneself. Increasingly, child development researchers are also finding that brain development during the first eight years is the most rapid, with children who receive attention in their early years achieving more success in school.
Sneha Sheth (Berkeley Haas MBA ’2016) knew these facts, having designed international programs for women’s empowerment and education for Dalberg, Education Pioneers, and Teach For India. She understood that early education in India was often neglected due to high rates of poverty and illiteracy–and that the nation holds many of the 200 million children in developing countries at risk of not reaching their full potential.
“I met hundreds of mothers, who had never gone to school,” said Sheth of her time working in a Mumbai slum. “They were willing to do whatever it took to get their kids a great education, but they weren’t really sure how. They would often ask me, ‘Well, I didn’t go to school, what can I really do about this?’”
While pursuing an MBA at Cal, Sheth began to think about an education technology project that could serve low-income Indian parents. During the summer of 2015, she and Sindhuja Jeyabal, who was completing a master’s degree at the UC Berkeley School of Information, piloted DOST, meaning friend in Hindi.
Sheth and Jeyabal then turned to the Big Ideas student innovation contest for development and feedback. Their Big Ideas mentor, Anthony Bloome, a senior education technology specialist at USAID, encouraged their ambition to come up with a solution for early childhood development in India. Big Ideas allowed Sheth and Jeyabal to iron out their implementation plan. In May 2016, DOST won in the Mobiles for Reading category.
Soon after, DOST was named one of the Top Three Edtech Startups in 2016 by the Unitus Seed Fund, followed by an invitation to join Y Combinator. In 2017, the team returned to Big Ideas, winning third place in the Scaling Up competition. The nonprofit’s supporters now include the Mulago Foundation, the David Weekley Family Foundation, and the Chintu Gudiya Foundation, among others.
The path to creating DOST was iterative, said Sheth. “At first, we talked to parents about how those who can’t read can still have a lot of weight in early childhood education. We had to show parents that playing, singing, and talking with their kids was a form of education.”
Sheth and Jeyabal recognized a major challenge was getting busy families to come to DOST early education classes. “You can’t change behavior in one session, and you can’t see changes penetrate in a community in just one session,” said Sheth. Even if one parent was able to attend sessions—and it was often the mothers—DOST wanted to involve fathers, grandparents, aunts, and other extended family members in lesson plans. When the team was brainstorming ideas for a practical approach to this problem, they finally asked, What if we just call them?
Due to the widespread use of Nokia cellphones, Sheth and Jeyabal began to consider a technological approach to parent learning. Sending podcasts to parents, they realized, would allow DOST to serve many families and grow rapidly. Parents also wouldn’t need to make the tough decision of deciding between attending a parenting class or cooking dinner.
Sneha Sheth explaining DOST Education to parents in India.
DOST began to develop 1- to 2-minute daily lesson plans and verbal activities as podcasts deliverable to parents’ phones, allowing busy mothers and fathers to integrate their child’s early development into their daily lives. The audio programs instruct parents to teach basic literacy and numeracy. The first audio program is 24 weeks long, and is targeted at parents of children who are two- to six-years of age. As of October 2018, there are 20,000 Indian caregivers using DOST every day, a figure that has grown 100 times in the last two years.
One of the first lesson plans featured how parents could speak to their children without intimidation. By trying a collaborative approach rather than a violent one, parents reported their children were more receptive to instructions and guidance. One of DOST’s most popular mini podcasts encourages mothers to make rotis in different shapes for dinner—fostering pre-numeracy skills at a young age.
To build awareness for DOST, the nonprofit has hired mothers from the communities it targets. “DOST Champions see the untapped potential in their own community and know how to convince their neighbors to join DOST,” said Sheth. “It’s also a plus to create employment in the areas we work in.”
Ultimately DOST’s mission is to provide uneducated parents with the resources to enable their children to excel. “Whether it’s by categorizing rotis as big or small during cooking or naming the colors in a sari,” said Sheth, “these kids will be more prepared for their future.”
Ryan Shaening Pokrasso (JD ’13), a San Francisco Bay Area attorney who specializes in assisting social entrepreneurs, has been a longtime judge and advisor for the Big Ideas student innovation competition.
Ryan entered the legal profession by way of nonprofit
By Francis Gonzales
Ryan Shaening Pokrasso (JD ’13), a San Francisco Bay Area attorney who specializes in assisting social entrepreneurs, has been a longtime judge and advisor for the Big Ideas student innovation competition.
Ryan entered the legal profession by way of nonprofit policy advocacy. He served as program director for New Energy Economy, a nonprofit organization in New Mexico, prior to attending law school at UC Berkeley School of Law. While with New Energy Economy, Ryan organized to support a cap on carbon emissions in New Mexico and he co-authored, lobbied for, and helped pass the New Mexico Green Jobs Act to provide funding for training programs in sustainable industries for disadvantaged individuals and families. He also led an effort that culminated in the establishment of the New Mexico Green Chamber of Commerce—an influential network of over 1,200 local businesses dedicated to strengthening local economies through sustainable business practices.
While at Boalt Hall, Ryan was a leader of Students for Economic and Environmental Justice and served as a board member for the Ecology Law Quarterly journal. Ryan worked with students, faculty, and legal practitioners to establish a student run Environmental Justice Clinic to provide pro bono legal services to communities disproportionately impacted by carbon intensive industries and to promote community-driven sustainable economic development in the Bay Area and California Central Valley.
Ryan’s diverse legal experience includes serving as: a law fellow for Accountability Counsel, where he supported indigenous communities impacted by large energy projects paid for by international financial institutions; a law clerk for Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger LLP, where he supported litigation on environmental issues on behalf of community groups, government agencies, and municipalities; and a law clerkship for U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Senate Judiciary Committee office where he provided extensive policy analysis of congressional proposals for the Senator.
Big Ideas sat down with Ryan to learn more about his career trajectory and commitment to supporting early stage social entrepreneurs.
Why did you found SPZ Legal?
My co-founder—Hash Zahed (UC Berkeley JD ’13)—and I had just completed legal fellowships when we decided to start SPZ. We were both in the process of thinking about next steps and “applying for a job” didn’t sound like it was the right fit for us. When we were in law school, we had talked about the possibility of starting some sort of business together, so that was on our radar. When our respective fellowships were ending, I texted Hash and asked him if he wanted to just start our own law firm. He wrote back, “Yes!”
We agreed that starting a firm would give us the opportunity to meet a lot of common goals. Specifically, we could structure our lives in a way that is often lacking from a career practicing law, we could have a great impact through using our legal knowledge and tools to assist social entrepreneurs in building business focused on social change and environmental stewardship, we could create a great place for others to work, and we could do all of this while making a good living for ourselves (which we did not do for the first couple of years!).
In law school, there is a common idea that you can either make a lot of money, work endless hours, and not be focused on having an impact on society, or you can not make money and have a societal impact. We thought this was a false dichotomy, so we started SPZ.
Can you talk about the dynamics between you and your co-founder? How do you complement each other? What advice do you have for students looking for a co-founder?
Hash and I were great friends prior to founding SPZ. You often hear that you should not mix friendship and business. And in working with our clients, we have definitely seen situations where friendships fell apart in the context of business relationships. But the reason that these friendships fall apart is a lack of communication—when friends were hesitant to have “hard conversations” with each other. Oftentimes, friends just assumed that they are on the same page about plans, roles, and responsibilities for the business, when they were not. However, when friends turned business partners are intentional about communication and focus on discussing things as they arise and as they are envisioned, then it can be the best type of business relationship. The reason for this is that friends have each others’ back in a way that business partners may not. When my son was born, Hash took on everything for a long time and never asked for anything in return. A business partner would not have done this. I am happy to say that Hash and I are still friends! And in fact, we recently added another partner to the firm—David De La Flor—who is also a great friend of ours.
So what I recommend to students looking for a co-founder is to focus on communication and personality fit. Skills, competency, and experience are obviously important, but if you do not enjoy working with your co-founder and spending A LOT of time with them, then it is not going to work.
What is it about working with startups that you’ve found most interesting?
Learning about our clients’ amazing work is by far the most interesting aspect of working with startups. We are learning about deep technology and innovative models for impact on a daily basis. It is really inspiring! And it is also so fun to be able to re-experience the excitement that comes with starting a company over and over again, as we work with first-time entrepreneurs.
Do you think more startup founders are trying to embed social impact into their business model from the start these days?
Absolutely! I don’t have the exact answer for why this is the case, but I feel like my generation and (even more so) the younger generation after me was raised with the idea that community is important and that there is a calling for each of us to be there for our community. And as community becomes more and more of a global concept, I think that the desire for folks to be there for the broader community around the world is increasing.
If you could give one piece of general advice to an early-stage social entrepreneur, what would it be?
Focus on communication—with co-founders, with customers, with vendors, with colleagues, and with anyone else who touches your business. If you have a perfect company and product but you don’t know how to be clear and friendly in communications, opportunities for success will fall by the wayside.
What’s one legal question that is never too early to start thinking about?
I would say that you should be thoughtful about protecting confidential information and IP as early as possible!
To learn more about SPZ Legal, please visit their website: http://www.spzlegal.com/ This is the first in a series of Q&As with Big Ideas judges and mentors.
Basic surgeries are far from basic. They require approximately 50 tools, which take about 2 minutes each for an experienced technician to clean. Operations in a trauma unit require as many as 400 tools. And in both environments, surgical tools can be easily misplaced, thrown away, or
By Veena Narashiman ’20
Basic surgeries are far from basic. They require approximately 50 tools, which take about 2 minutes each for an experienced technician to clean. Operations in a trauma unit require as many as 400 tools. And in both environments, surgical tools can be easily misplaced, thrown away, or misassembled. In fact in the U.S. alone, busy surgical teams inadvertently leave an instrument inside a patient about 1,500 times a year.
Solving the problem of surgical tool tracking is the focus of VIDI, a startup launched in November 2017 by Federico Alvarez del Blanco (’18 UC Berkeley MBA), John Kim (PhD ’18 UC Berkeley/UCSF Bioengineering), Hector Neira, (PhD ’18 UC Berkeley/UCSF Bioengineering), and Robert Kim (PhD candidate, UCSD MD/PhD, Neuroscience)—which received a Big Ideas 2nd place award in May in the Hardware for Good category.
The group of Cal students were inspired by a campus workshop on visual recognition sponsored by information technology company NEC. They began to realize that the same machine learning technologies being deployed for self-driving cars could be used to increase hospital efficiency by tracking the flow of sterilization tools used in operations and thus minimizing medical errors.
VIDI (which means “see” in Latin) is being developed to do the following: As technicians prepare instruments before a procedure, a camera facing the surgical tray tracks where each tool goes and ensures the number of tools present in the beginning remains constant throughout the process. When a tool goes missing, the technology alerts technicians of a possible error.
Neria, Kim, del Blanco, and Kim initially decided to target hospitals’ Central Processing Departments, where most tools are sterilized, since this area is more accessible than operating rooms. “We figured it was a good place to start. The less high stakes for a prototype, the better,” said John Kim. The team also realized sterilization operators are vastly underappreciated and underpaid, even though they are expected to enable fast turnover of surgical tools. “These technicians don’t stay in the same hospitals for a long time, because they burn out quickly. Also, every hospital has a different technique and different name for their procedures. It’s super easy to get confused and make a mistake as an operator,” added Kim.
Yet the focus on the Central Processing Departments did not yield enough information about tool loss. So the VIDI team members turned their attention to the surgical room. By placing a table top camera facing the surgical tray (filled with cleaned instruments), VIDI was able to automatically catalog the tools, a feature that cuts the operator’s time by half.
To further their idea, Hector Neria, John Kim, and Robert Kim participated in the National Science Foundation I-Corps, and conducted upwards of 100 interviews to understand the state of the medical field. From there, they entered the Haas NEC Innovative Solutions Fair, where they partnered with MBA student Federico Alvarez del Blanco, and subsequently won first place. Throughout the process, they explored new markets.
Said John Kim: “Our initial motivation was to tackle the issue of surgical tools being left in patients [a term called RSI], but that only accounts for 5 percent of all misuses… It’s not a huge market. We discovered that tracking the instruments was not well managed, and hospitals were having a hard time converting to new tools.”
At this stage, they were ready for Big Ideas ideation and mentorship.
“Previous competitions were mainly focused on customer discovery,” said Kim. “We needed Big Ideas to receive feedback on our value proposition, and this feedback helped us understand more about our competitors and where they lie in the market.”
With the help of their Big Ideas mentor, product development specialist Bayan M. Qandil, they began to frame their business proposal. “One of our biggest hurdles was determining hospital workflow, and where VIDI fits in [it],” said Kim. “Big Ideas allowed us to experience the hospital atmosphere more intimately, so we could understand of how the day-to-day works. Their feedback was invaluable.”
One of their main takeaways and pivot points began with the realization that unlike other companies, VIDI users wouldn’t be the ones buying the product. In fact, the financial decision makers—hospital administrators—would never touch VIDI, yet they were still the people the team has to convince. “It’s a tricky situation to be in, but ultimately a good challenge,” said Kim. “Interviewing technicians from UCSF and the CEO of John Muir’s Medical Center helped us understand the balance of things. Hospitals realize the gravity of surgical mistakes and want to eliminate them. ”
VIDI now has the capability to detect 50 surgical instruments in a hospital setting. In September, they were chosen as finalists in the 2018 Collegiate Inventors Competition, which rewards innovation and research conducted by college students and their faculty advisers. They’ll be traveling to Virginia in November for the final round, in the hope to receive funding to advance their project.
The VIDI team, which chose its name from Julius Caesar’s saying veni vidi vici, is not shy about its excitement for the future. Said Kim, “The healthcare system desperately needs improvement—and our team wants to get our hands dirty as soon as possible to help hospitals with these unforced errors.”
In 2016, as Sarrah Nomanbhoy was starting her MBA at the Haas School of Business, the refugee crisis in Europe was in its second peak year and over a million applicants applied for asylum to the EU.
Nomanbhoy, a native Californian, had been watching
Veena Narashiman ’2020
In 2016, as Sarrah Nomanbhoy was starting her MBA at the Haas School of Business, the refugee crisis in Europe was in its second peak year and over a million applicants applied for asylum to the EU.
Nomanbhoy, a native Californian, had been watching the refugee crisis unfold since her undergraduate days at Stanford, where she studied international relations. She understood that the forces behind the crisis were bound to exacerbate the situation and the number of displaced people would only increase. She also began to understand that only 2 percent of refugees have access to voluntary repatriation, resettlement, or local housing solutions; the rest face long-term encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys.
At UC Berkeley, Nomanbhoy learned from Law Professor Katerina Linos that many asylum seekers arriving in Europe lack adequate information about how to apply for asylum, particularly how to prepare for the arduous asylum interviews. This motivated her and fellow graduate students Jerry Philip (Haas MBA ’18) and Peter Wasserman (Haas MBA 18) to apply for a Hult Prize focused on the refugee crisis.
MarHub intern Ramah Awad (left) and Jerry Philip (EWMBA ’19) show MarHub’s prototype to NGO staff in the Ritsona Refugee Camp in Greece.
Their idea was to come up with a digital means to inform asylum seekers about what to expect at asylum interviews and to convey a variety of legal rights, including the option to review interview transcripts and replace a translator. According to Nomanbhoy, about 70 percent of asylum seekers receive negative decisions after this first set of interviews, and many are in limbo pending the outcome of the appeal process.
With support from various Berkeley grants, the team traveled to Greece during the summer of 2017 to research the project. They saw firsthand that refugees often seek asylum alone, without much legal advice. Although legal aid organizations were on the ground, they witnessed there were not enough resources to accommodate the many asylum cases. As a result, the refugees often went into the life-defining interview process blind, reducing the chances for a favorable outcome.
When the three students returned to campus, they began to develop a chatbot, called MarHub (a reference to the Arabic greeting marhaba), which would allow refugees to receive personalized information regarding their specific path to asylum. Among the team’s insights is that a vast majority of Syrian migrants in Europe and the Middle East own smartphones and thus can be serviced remotely, without a large team on the ground.
Said Nomanbhoy: “The gaps in legal assistance are widely acknowledged, but it’s just a very difficult problem to tackle. When refugees seek asylum, there isn’t enough legal aid to go around. The procedures are constantly changing, and it is difficult for organizations to disseminate new information. We just make that information more accessible.”
By the fall of 2017, the MarHub team knew they had a strong idea, but they were struggling with their implementation strategy. They turned to the Blum Center’s Big Ideas student innovation contest for mentorship and support.
“Big Ideas forced us to flesh out the logistics of our pilot,” said Nomanbhoy. “We discovered some small pitfalls in our initial strategy, and thankfully we were able to proactively address them.”
Katy Digovich, who works for the Clinton Health Access Initiative and served as MarHub’s Big Ideas mentor, proved especially beneficial, as she has expertise in implementing technology solutions in resource constrained environments.
“Katy helped us think about building strong partnerships and managing the expectations of our key stakeholders,” said Nomanbhoy. “There are so many people affected by this refugee crisis. We realized the dangers of wanting to go too big too quickly.”
Feedback from the judges in the first and second rounds of the competition helped Nomanbhoy and her colleagues refine their purpose and think carefully about their approach. Utilizing feedback from the judges in the first and second rounds of the competition allowed the team to refine their purpose and helped them win third place in the Connected Communities category in May 2018.
The Marhub team is now preparing to launch a limited pilot in Lebanon early next year. Refugees there will be able to access MarHub on Facebook messenger and receive updated information instantaneously. After refugees answer a few questions, for example, the MarHub tool walks them through what to expect and how to present their case. The information comes directly from legal organizations devoted to the refugee crisis, protecting refugees from misinformation.
In the short term, Marhub’s chatbot will help people apply for refugee status and resettlement
and provide information about legal rights. In the long term, the team hopes to connect refugees with a wide range of services, including job placement, health services, and housing.
“The scale of the crisis is overwhelming, but we’re starting with a narrow focus,” said Nomanbhoy of her team’s approach. “We hope to expand our scope as we learn more about the needs of our stakeholders.”
