Berkeley undergraduates Ankita Joshi, Aubrey Larson and Michelle Nie met in a social entrepreneurship class at the Haas School of Business. Connecting over a common passion for economic empowerment as a solution to poverty, they decided to develop a project that would promote financial inclusion within the STEM field.
The UC Berkeley Blum Center for Developing Economies is thrilled to announce an exciting new partnership with the Autodesk Foundation, which includes launching a new Big Ideas contest category, “Hardware for Good,” and supporting project-based immersive learning experiences within the Development Engineering (DevEng) program.
As one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious social impact contests, Big Ideas provides up to $300,000 directly to students each year for their groundbreaking initiatives.
In the last round of the 2016 Big Ideas Competition, finalists in the IT category presented their ideas for health justice, campus security, special education, and mental health.
Summaries of the 41 final teams from 266 students teams representing more than 750 students across 16 different campuses.
To help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Big Ideas competition, a record-shattering 266 applications were received. On April 27, 2016, after months of working to develop their ideas, six teams were selected to present at “Pitch Day” before a packed audience at Blum Hall.
The Blum Center for Developing Economies is excited to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Big Ideas Contest! The Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas Contest offers students an opportunity to turn their …
2015 Global Health Big Ideas winner Hombres Verdaderos aims to improve health outcomes by stopping domestic violence before it starts. Set to launch in March, the program will engage young, at-risk adolescent boys, ages 11 to 14 years old, from districts in Barranquilla, Colombia.
When it comes to public health, changing behavior sometimes requires coming up with creative incentives. That’s what 2014 Big Ideas Winners Jacqueline Nguyen and Mark Webb had in mind when designing their clean-burning stove, KleanCook.
“Jacaranda Health emerged from a confluence of understanding health care through the eyes of women and identifying the gaps in the business landscape,” said Pearson.
Over the next three years, the Development Studies student found herself yearning to return to the informal settlement, where 250,000 residents live in less than one square mile and lack basic services and infrastructure such as education, healthcare, and clean water.
Time is ticking for University of California students to submit their world-changing concepts to Big Ideas@Berkeley, one of the nation’s oldest and most international student innovation competitions.
Sanitation and the removal of human waste are among the biggest environmental health issues of our time. According to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 70 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa lacks access to adequate sanitation.
In May 2015, Cristobal Madero, a Chilean native and PhD student in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, invited 14 of Chile's most elite high schools to participate in a novel educational experiment.
Big Ideas winner and UC Santa Cruz graduate student Dustin Adams, who works in UC Santa Cruz’s Interactive Systems for Individuals with Special Needs lab, designed tool to recognize and describe photos.
Despite India’s robust government immunization program—which provides 11 different vaccinations free of cost—immunization rates remain low, particularly among poor populations.
When the Big Ideas student innovation contest launched 10 years ago, it was a novel concept: give teams of students with potential breakthrough ideas small sums of money and a variety of supports and see what happens. Over the past decade, a lot has happened.
Prompted by funding and recognition from the Big Ideas@Berkeley contest, a group of Cal students headed by Mechanical Engineering graduate student Julia Kramer is seeking to establish a sustainable training program called “Visualize” for midwives in Ghana.
On May 5, the Blum Center celebrated the eight-month journey that was the 2014-2015 Big Ideas@Berkeley student innovation contest with an awards celebration recognizing 46 winning projects for social change.
The 2014-2015 Big Ideas Contest received a record number of applications from 201 teams representing over 700 students across nine UC campuses and 17 other universities. The teams presented hundreds of innovative …
