Rohaut wondered if there might be an opportunity to transform underutilized residencies like her apartment during the day into productive spaces for freelancers -- to create a kind of “Airbnb for coworking spaces.” That spark led to Codi, an online platform

Ishita Jain, a judge in the 2018-2019 Big Ideas Contest, specializes in using design as a tool for social impact. She works at the Autodesk Foundation, where she supports entrepreneurs and innovators focused on innovative design solutions

How do you become a social entrepreneur? The question has been the subject of many articles, books, and TED talks. For applicants to the Big Ideas social innovation contest, however, the answer is fairly simple: motivation and mentorship.

In November 2018, the Contest received over 330 pre-proposal applications, representing over 1,000 students across 12 campuses. After a preliminary round and a final review, 34 teams were awarded prizes across 8 different categories, with award amounts ranging from $2,000 to $15,000.

On Wednesday, April 24, 2019 teams representing the top seven innovations, the BIGGEST Big Ideas, will face off for top honors (and up to $5,000) at the annual Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day.

With the encouragement of bioengineering professor Seung-Wuk Lee, Chiu and his team had submitted their glucose sensor to Cal’s Big Idea Contest, which provides funding and support to interdisciplinary teams of students with inventive proposals.

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.

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).

Early in 2017, Ryan Protzko, then a doctoral student in biochemistry at UC Berkeley, was working on research to turn orange peels into eco-friendly bottles and contacted a citrus juicer in California’s Central Valley. Would the company be able to spare some orange peels? Yes, responded the representative, the juicer could

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

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

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

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 Lemelson Foundation, the world’s leading funder of invention in service of social and economic change, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies

As a graduate student at MIT, Aukrit Unahalekhaka decided to put his education toward a critical piece of the global hunger challenge: financial inclusion for smallholder farmers.

Big Ideas is not just big in aspiration, it’s big in social and entrepreneurial impact. Since 2006, the Contest—open to undergraduate and graduate students at all 10 UC campuses—has kickstarted 2,000 early stage ventures and funded nearly 500 organizations, with teams going on to leverage an additional $650 million in funding in the areas of global health, workforce development, energy and resource alternatives, art and social change, food systems, connected communities, and more.

By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas, with 40 percent of this growth occurring in slums. One critical development challenge is the lack of adequate sewer systems--currently, one in every five city dwellers lacks access to

To celebrate UC Berkeley’s 150th anniversary, the Blum Center for Developing Economies created an interactive graphic showcasing 150 Big Ideas winners. Big Ideas is the Blum Center’s annual student innovation contest, which since 2006 has provided funding, support, and mentoring to over 6,000 students seeking to have real-world impact in the areas of clean energy, global health and food security, among other global challenges.

An injured soldier is rushed to a field hospital and is bleeding out. A surgeon needs to give the soldier meds to speed up her clotting. But too much or too little will kill her. The doctors rely on lab equipment to determine dosage; however, the large machine was never

Breslauer is a 2007 Big Ideas alumni who won awards for ‘Biologically Inspired Microfluidic Silk Spinning’ device and CellScope.

2018 Big Ideas Contest Winners Mike Mitchell and Sam Bordia, both graduating this month with a master’s degree in international development, have launched an audacious plan

This year’s Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas Contest launched in September 2017. In November, the Contest received over 300 pre-proposal applications, representing over 1,000 students across 11 campuses. After a preliminary round …

For the past eight months, over 1000 students from eleven universities have worked to transform their visions to improve society into high-impact social ventures. On April

In February 2018, Big Ideas Contest Director, Phillip Denny, traveled to Kampala, Uganda to explore opportunities for Big Ideas expansion in Africa, in partnership with Makerere University. Makerere—one of Africa’s leading institutions of higher education—has been a key partner of Big Ideas since