Category: News & Updates

UC Big Ideas Contest Joins The Rockefeller-Acumen Student Social Innovation Challenge

The Big Ideas Contest has been named one of four university social innovation competitions to be a part of The 2019-2020 Rockefeller Foundation-Acumen Student Social Innovation Challenge.

The Big Ideas Contest has been named one of four university social innovation competitions to be a part of The 2019-2020 Rockefeller Foundation-Acumen Student Social Innovation Challenge. The other three universities are MIT, University of Michigan, and University of San Diego.

With the new partnership, Big Ideas will support students at all 10 University of California campuses as well as at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Makerere University in Uganda to build innovative solutions to poverty and some of the world’s most intractable social challenges. The total number of eligible students across the 12 campuses will be over 300,000 in the 2019-2020 academic year. Students are encouraged to propose innovative solutions across a broad range of social impact tracks, including: Workforce Development, Global Health, Food & Agriculture, Financial Inclusion, Energy & Resources, Education & Literacy, Cities & Communities, and Art & Social Change.

As part of The Rockefeller Foundation-Acumen Student Social Innovation Challenge, the Big Ideas Contest will offer students an exclusive set of resources that leverage the experience of the Rockefeller Foundation and Acumen in building successful social enterprises. Winning teams from Big Ideas will be invited to join a social innovator network hosted by Acumen, where they can connect with peer innovators and receive ongoing support.

“We at Big Ideas are delighted to be part of the 2019-2020 Rockefeller Foundation-Acumen Student Social Innovation Challenge. Collaborations, networks, partnerships–and especially challenges–are what make the social enterprise sector grow and hum,” said Phillip Denny, director of Big Ideas. “We expect the usual avalanche of world-changing ideas from students this academic year.

Acumen is a global nonprofit, founded in 2001 with seed capital from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cisco Systems Foundation, and three individual philanthropists, which tackles poverty by investing in sustainable businesses, leaders, and ideas. The Rockefeller Foundation‘s mission, unchanged since 1913, is to improve the well-being of humanity around the world. Since its 2006 establishment at UC Berkeley, Big Ideas has inspired innovative and high-impact student-led projects aimed at solving problems that matter to this generation through an annual contest that provides funding, guidance, and encouragement.

CONTACT:
Phillip Denny,
Director, Big Ideas Contest
pdenny@berkeley.edu
(510) 666-9120

How One Big Idea Led to an Innovative Co-working Solution

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

By Emily Denny

As a freelancer and a master’s degree student at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (M.C.P.), Christelle Rohaut found coffee shops too crowded, co-working spaces too expensive, and her own home too isolating. In 2016, on her daily commute home, she saw rows of overpacked coffee shops.

“I also found it incredibly ironic that my living room was empty all day long,” said Rohaut.

That’s when she had her “ah-ha” moment. 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 that connects freelancers sick of coffee shops and expensive coworking spaces with owners and renters looking for additional income to help with housing affordability and building connections within their local community. (Image: Get the Codi app and walk to work at codiwork.com!)

“Our goal is to bring back what you need to feel productive in your work, next to where you live,” added Rohaut to underscore what differentiates Codi from all other co-working spaces. She also stressed that Codi addresses the rising housing costs while reducing traffic and pollution. “It’s a model that is tailored toward addressing the main challenges facing the workforce in most U.S.cities”. This is especially distressing in the especially in the Bay Area, where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,750 according to Zumper.

Boosted by F7, a seed investment fund comprised of seven female leaders who met during their tenure at Facebook, Rohaut and her team of seven are launching Codi across the Bay Area later this month.

Rohaut credits much of her early success to the opportunities and resources she was able to access at UC Berkeley in honing her entrepreneurial skills. In 2017, she took the Social Innovator On-Ramp, a Blum Center course that helps students take an idea and turn it into a viable project. The same year, she entered Codi into the Big Ideas Contest, a social innovation competition that since 2006 has helped 6,300 students go on to win over $2.6 million for their projects. Much to her surprise and delight, Codi took first prize in Big Ideas’ Connected Communities category for the 2017-2018 contest season.

When asked how other Berkeley students can become successful entrepreneurs, Rohaut’s responded without missing a beat, “Do Big Ideas,” because the contest provided her with the support and confidence she needed to get Codi off the ground. It also gave her experience pitching in front of large crowds and connected her with an invaluable mentor, Steven Horowitz, a startup advisor who is the founder and principal of the Ovidian Group, an intellectual property business advisory firm in Berkeley. (Image: Christelle Rohaut, 2nd from left, with the Codi team.)

“There were so many great projects submitted. Winning the top prize was a great validation of our mission, and being able to work with a mentor like Steven is an amazing opportunity,” added Rohaut.

“I bought the pitch: there’s a problem, there’s a solution, and I thought. Let’s go with it,”  remembered Horowitz of the first time he heard Rohaut pitch Codi. “There’s something about Christelle’s intelligence and her earnestness that communicates a kind of can-do and will-do attitude,” said Steven. “She’s got that drive.”

Horowitz said he also was intrigued by Codi because of its circular economy model, connecting freelance workers and hosts with local economies. He believes the company could engender many indirect benefits to cities, local economies, and freelance workers.

Codi is entering a crowded sharing economy market. Yet as opposed to other co-working companies, it focuses on location, conveniently building coworking networks within neighborhoods, rather than downtown metropolitan areas.

“Our specialty is that we connect home-based workspaces during the day with workers in their neighborhood,” said Rohaut, who added that her favorite part of Codi is when freelancers working for the first time in the same home organically go out for lunch together. Not only is this important to bringing traffic to a neighborhood’s local economy, she explained; it also creates a sense of community among neighbors, something she feels her generation is losing rapidly.

Codi’s seed funding from F7 came not only because Rohaut is one of the few female founders in the Bay Area, but because her startup’s central mission is to create a positive social impact. Rohaut said she often finds herself as the only woman in the room during large corporate meetings. However, due to F7’s investment, she said, “It feels great to be part of something that encourages women to go ahead and follow their dreams, even if that space is dominated mostly by men.”

Rohaut’s startup leverages the idiosyncrasies of the San Francisco Bay Area real estate market, yet she believes her idea will work very well in most major US cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and New York.

“We are very excited to have launched our app,” she said. “And we have a long waitlist — hundreds of people have already signed up in the Bay Area. Let the Codi revolution begin!”

Big Ideas Judge Ishita Jain: Human-Centered Design for Social Impact

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

By Francis Gonzales

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 to the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges. Ishita honed her passion for design through a Master in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts, where she developed skills in ethnographic research, facilitation, user experience, systems mapping, data visualization, social entrepreneurship, and leadership.

Big Ideas sat down with Ishita to learn how social entrepreneurs can use the human-centered design process to drive their work forward and increase their impact.

How would you describe human-centered design?
I would define human-centered design (HCD) as a bottom up process where end users and other stakeholders play a key role in shaping solutions that meet their needs. The HCD approach prioritizes participation by community members and helps remove biases that we might have as people coming from outside of that community attempting to solve a problem.

What are the differences between the use of human-centered design in the private sector versus the social impact sector?
Ultimately, I think the difference between HCD in the private sector as opposed to the social impact sector comes down to intention. The driving goal in the private sector is to make a product user-centric, so that people will consume more of it and thus increase corporate profits. In contrast, in the social sector, HCD is a tool that can be used to understand and develop solutions to problems where there may not be a monetary incentive.

What role do you see human-centered design playing in the social impact and international development space today?
I see HCD as a tool to create environmental and social value. It can be used in many ways, but the four that resonate most with me are:

  1. Problem Finding: The HCD methodologies and frameworks help you get to the core of a problem. The problem statement will evolve over time and the longer you look, the closer you’ll get to the true problem.
  2. Community Understanding: As practitioners in the social impact space, we often come from outside the community we’re trying to help. Our decisions and hypotheses are initially based on assumptions. HCD methodologies can be used to engage community members and build empathy to prove or disprove those assumptions.
  3. Rapid prototyping: Sometimes we can get stuck in research mode, but the HCD process forces you to test early ideas. Presenting your prototypes as works in progress will help users feel comfortable commenting on what they like or don’t like.
  4. Continuous learning and reflection: The HCD process encourages daily reflection and analysis. The key here is continuous learning. With each finding, asking yourself, “What does it mean?” and “How does it change my work?”

Is there an example of an organization successfully using HCD methods that you can share?
The one that immediately comes to mind is Proximity Designs, a nonprofit social venture working to reduce poverty and hunger for tens of thousands of rural families in Burma/Myanmar since 2004. Proximity addresses extreme poverty by treating the poor as customers and offering innovative and affordably designed technologies and services. For example, its customers replace their rope and buckets with Proximity’s foot-powered irrigation pumps and typically double their net seasonal cash income. Proximity spends countless hours observing and interviewing rural households, learning what they value, identifying root problems and most importantly, developing empathy that leads to lasting solutions to the problems they face. The insights Proximity gleans from intimate exposure to customers are what drives its on-site product design lab. Products are manufactured locally and reach customers through a nationwide distribution network linking independent agro-dealers, village entrepreneurs (who work as product reps), and village-based groups.

What advice do you have for a team that’s been working on a project for six months or a year and then realizes they want to apply HCD methods?
The HCD process can be applied at any time, but you can’t be so wedded to your current solution that, if you learn something new, you’re not willing to pivot. You might realize that you’ve been working to solve the wrong problem, and then think you have to start from scratch. But actually, you don’t have to, because you’ve learned everything that got you to that point and you can build off of that.

Do you have to be a designer to practice human-centered design? What does it take to practice human-centered design?
Absolutely not! Anyone can practice HCD. It’s all about having the right mindset and toolset. In terms of mindset, the five things I think about are: 1) Being open to ambiguity, 2) Adaptability, 3) Ability to learn from failure, 4) Empathy, and 5) Collaboration.
In terms of toolset, the things I keep using are:

  • Mapping frameworks: Stakeholder mapping and systems mapping can be used to better understand the landscape.
  • Storytelling methods: Framing the problem/solution in a compelling narrative is essential when communicating with stakeholders including partners, funders, and users.
  • Monitoring and evaluation: Design is such an iterative process that your objectives will change over time, but it’s important to figure out what your north star is (e.g. reduce plastic waste) and use M&E to assess your progress in reaching that goal.
  • Facilitation: Design is a team sport. The best designers are adept at bringing people together from diverse backgrounds to work towards a shared goal.

What resources would you suggest to people who are interested in starting to incorporate human-centered design principles and methodologies into their social impact work?  
Podcasts are a great way to get a sense of what people are doing all over the world. My favorite podcast is Social Design Insights by the Curry Stone Foundation. Another resource I would recommend are open innovation challenges. Tackling an issue you care about on a challenge site like OpenIdeo is a great way to start practicing HCD. I participated in an open challenge and found it interesting to see how people from all over the world were thinking about the same challenge in different ways. Toolkits are also a great free resource. The top on my list are Design for Health from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID, the DIY toolkit by Nesta UK, and the NYC Civic Service Design toolkit. Another resource that I can’t emphasize enough is conversations with people working in the HCD field. These informational interviews will give you a fuller sense of how you really do this work.

Any final words of advice for student innovators reading this?
Make sure that the needs of the people are at the heart of your innovation. I would also challenge budding human-centered designers to think about a new concept: environmental-centered design. This involves asking: “How does one design for a ‘client’ who doesn’t have a voice?” While I see a lot of value in the HCD methodology, I am critical of thinking about human needs in a vacuum, without considering wider environmental concerns. This is especially true for the private sector. We want so many new things, but at what cost? It’s becoming more and more necessary to know our own limits in terms of how far we can stretch our planet’s resources.

Motivation and Mentorship Spurred 2019 Big Ideas Contest Winners

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.


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.

The recently concluded 2018-2019 Big Ideas Contest brought together over 400 judges and mentors—from six continents—to evaluate proposals and support teams. This group looked at a record number of applications (337) from eight UC campuses to award prizes ranging from $2,000 to $15,000 to 34 undergraduate and graduate students teams, the majority of which were female-led. While securing funding is necessary for any early stage social venture, winners consistently said the key catalysts  were the Contest’s nine-month structure and access to mentorship.

Ryan Barr (center) and the RePurpose Energy team

“The best way to grow an idea into a plan is to research and write under the guidance of a mentor,” said Ryan Barr, a UC Davis PhD student whose RePurpose Energy won first place in both the Energy & Resource Alternatives category and the Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day.

Barr, who is developing a product and service to test, reassemble, and redeploy used electric vehicle batteries to provide commercial solar developers with energy storage solutions at half the cost of new battery alternatives, was motivated by the possibility of Big Ideas’ seed funding. Yet he also knew he needed expert help.

“Beth Ferguson, our mentor, offered a fresh perspective on how to communicate our technology’s potential to investors, current collaborators, and our larger community,” he said. “And Big Ideas has opened doors to additional funding and growth opportunities.”

Other highlights from this year’s Big Ideas Contest included a spike in applications from across the University of California system and the continued success of student teams from Makerere University in Uganda, which has been an international partner of Big Ideas since 2014. Since implementing the UC System Student Innovation Ambassadors program in 2017, Big Ideas has seen an 88 percent increase in overall applications from UC system, proving that student-to-student support helps. The Contest also saw a record number of applications from Makerere University—77 in total—including a first place and honorable mention in Global Health, and second place winners in the Energy & Resource Alternatives and the Food Systems categories.

“Over the past 13 years, it’s been great to see the Contest grow—not only in terms of applicants, mentors, and judges, but also in terms of the gender and geographic diversity,” said Phillip Denny, director of Big Ideas. “This diversity makes sense because, inherently, social entrepreneurs are out to diversify access to the world’s key resources and opportunities.”

Moses Kintu, who led the winning Cloud-based Emergency Response System (CERS) team with classmates from Makerere University in Uganda, said he found the nine-month period of reworking his idea for using mobile technologies to improve ambulance service in Kampala to be crucial.

“The mentorship program was an unbelievable learning opportunity, and participating in Big Ideas helped us to fine-tune our project and execution plan after a lot of chopping and changing and pivoting,” said Kintu, a fourth year Health and Medical Sciences undergraduate student.

UC Merced’s Haoyu Niu, iBMW team lead.

Haoyu Niu, a UC Merced PhD student whose agtech robot iBMW won first place in the Food Systems category, viewed the Contest as a skills-building exercise.

“During training and mentoring period, I learned how to write a good proposal, how to show my idea has social impact, and how to build a team,” said Niu. “Big Ideas provided the mentorship and resources that enabled me to make my iBMW project concrete, feasible, and scalable.”

A complete list of this year’s 2018-2019 Big ideas winning teams can be found on the Big Ideas website!

About Big Ideas: The Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas Contest provides students with funding, support and mentorship for developing their social ventures. Since its launch in 2006, Big Ideas has received over 2400 proposals, supported more than 7,000 students from multiple universities, and provided seed funding for participants that have gone on to secure over $650 million in additional funding. The Big Ideas contest is made possible through the generous support of the Rudd Family Foundation, as well as category sponsors including Autodesk Foundation, The Lemelson Foundation,  USAID, the UC Office of the President, Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), and the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

2019 Big Ideas Contest Winners Announced!

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.

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.

Categories

In addition to the category winners, several teams were recognized with additional honors at the Big Ideas Contest end-of-year-events.

ART & SOCIAL CHANGE

Kaloum Bankhi (Home of Kaloum): A Migration of Architecture (1st Place)
Team Members: Matt Turlock, Carmen Durrer, Matt Fairris, Aboubacar Komara
School: UC Berkeley
Kaloum Bankhi is “process-focused” and not “product focused”. The mission is to ensure every resident in Kaloum, Guinea lives in a durable home, and the approach is multidisciplinary in establishing a self-sustaining local supply chain. In order to realize this goal, the project takes a multi-faceted approach, innovating the physical design, the financial mechanism, and social systems. This house model is designed to be built in stages instead of all at once. This enables residents to remain in their own home during a progressive transformation at the householder’s pace and cash-flow. Guinean culture is celebrated with this alternative housing solution that is built by a community, for a community. Architecture becomes art, bringing social change to the canvas of Kaloum. The project envisions that the knowledge invested in the community will grow beyond the slums – an architectural migration providing durable homes for all of Kaloum.
Dance for All Bodies (2nd Place)
Team Members: Yagmur Halezeroglu, Tess Hanson
School: UC Berkeley
Dance has been shown to be very impactful on individuals and the community at the emotional, cognitive and physical level. However, there aren’t many inclusive dance classes for people with limb differences (PWLD). Dance for All Bodies (DfAB) addresses this gap through organizing monthly adaptive (interpretive, adapted to their own physical abilities) dance classes for people with limb differences in the Bay Area. Through these classes DfAB aims to create an inclusive and non-judgmental space for PWLD to dance, express themselves, and find community in shared experience. DfAB takes charge of finding an accessible dance space and scheduling teachers who have experience and interest in teaching adaptive dance classes. These classes will be made accessible through outreach and partnerships with disability organizations, hospitals and dance companies in the Bay Area.
Crimmigration (3rd Place)
Team Members: JoeBill Muñoz
School: UC Berkeley
In the summer of 2018, the merger between migration and criminal law reached a boiling point when the United States concluded that a logical solution to deterring migrants from entering the country illegally was to separate migrant parents from their children. The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy received international scrutiny for its inhumanity. Through personal narratives, witness testimonies and expert interviews, this documentary series will trace this policy backwards over the last century, looking at the laws, movements, and wars that birthed it. How did we get to this point? How can we change it? What the Netflix documentary, 13th, is to the prison industrial complex, this series will be to crimmigration law. In the end, you’ll never think about immigration the same again.
Bosco The Inclusive Forest (Honorable Mention)
Team Members: Enrica Costello, Zack Ragozzino, Allison Lee, Joshua King, Alessandro Olivieri
School: UC Santa Barbara
Sophisticated technologies, such as virtual reality’s (VR) immersive experiences, allow one to build effective tools to challenge implicit discriminatory bias. This project includes: 1) An art installation: two participants experience stories of racial and gender discrimination in VR. Personal and bio-medical data from the participant’s reactions are collected and visualized. Participants are encouraged to record their own story of injustice and discrimination. 2) A data visualization design project organizes and analyzes the personal, biomedical data and audio recordings, draws objective conclusions and elaborates strategies for corrective measures. The virtual forest is a source of narratives, collaborations and interactions, a data visualization space, and artistic experience in VR. In order to create a culture of inclusion and tolerance, the main goal is to make an impact by allowing participants to “see” their discriminatory bias and feel compassion toward minorities.
Common Objects, Uncommon Purpose: Fighting Unconscious Bias with Art (Honorable Mention)
Team Members: Emily Kearney, Catharine Adams, Linet Mera
School: UC Berkeley
Despite our best intentions, everyday discrimination bubbles up from unconscious biases we don’t realize we have. “Common Objects, Uncommon Purpose” will address this by raising awareness, concern, and knowledge of unconscious bias. In particular, it will target skeptics who may not think bias is a problem. The campaign will use a mixed-media approach that employs humor, cartoons, interactive art installations, and artfully designed practical objects. This project will use public spaces, social media, and our daily lives to start an open dialogue about unconscious bias and its effects. It will empower community members to propel the campaign forward with art, fact, & tact.

CONNECTED COMMUNITIES

Qloak (1st Place)
Team Members: Julian Johnson, Maria Antonio Scopu, Hoaian Dang
School: UC Berkeley
As a result of the current social and political climate, the LGBTQ+ community has found it increasingly difficult to find safe spaces. A study by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) shows that hate-driven violence often occurs in the privacy of communities, homes, workplaces, and shelters. By providing knowledge of spaces that have been proven to support the LGBTQ+ community, and that can serve its unique needs as necessary, Qloak is removing the burden from community members who may struggle to find their footing in heteronormative environments. Qloak serves as a hub integrating queer spaces featuring such categories as Work (jobs), Play (bars and entertainment), Spend (businesses), and Resources (doctors, counselors, etc). Cultivating knowledge of these spaces is necessary in order to foster a sense of belonging and security.
CoopNet (2nd Place)
Team Members: Aaron Scherf, Ramsay Boly, Jinsu Elhance, Cara Wolfe
School: UC Berkeley
CoopNet’s vision is to create a digital financing model for shared housing, leveraging the community activation of crowdfunding to bring together residents and investors who believe in the virtues of cooperative living. Not only would such an online platform provide a legal, regulated, and contractually sound method for cooperatives to access financing, it offers the flexibility needed to scale across different property types and urban markets. Every cooperative housing venture financed via CoopNet would create immediate and lasting benefits for local communities: reducing overall housing costs, offering an alternative and communal style of living, and creating opportunities for residents to shape their communities rather than depending on governments, banks, or real estate developers. By June 2020, CoopNet plans to facilitate the formation of approximately 14 cooperative housing units, connecting over 70 local residents, and saving residents an estimated $320,000 in cumulative housing costs, with greater savings expected as the co-ops continue and CoopNet expands.
Seminar (3rd Place)
Team Members: Kevin Liu, Shomil Jain, Nima Rezaeian
School: UC Berkeley
At first sight, people begin to form judgements about each other in their heads based on appearance, race, gender, and other superficial factors. These are called “implicit biases”, and they affect the ways we think, act, and perceive the world around us. From gender discrimination in the workplace to racial profiling in our communities, many of the issues we face as a country stem from the consequences of our implicit biases. Seminar is a platform intended to be used in the high school classroom to address these biases in an engaging and unique manner. Through a mobile app, students are allowed to converse with their peers through a model that facilitates productive conversations without the inhibitions of superficial influences. Through proprietary pairing and impact algorithms, Seminar learns about the community it is deployed in and improves the student experience over time.
Viva (3rd Place)
Team Members: Catherine Soler, Cristy Meier, Ashten Bartz, Bethany Ellenbogen
School: UC Berkeley
60% of Americans are suffering from chronic diseases, of which 80% are preventable by a healthy lifestyle. With all of the current options available for health and wellness, we still aren’t preventing disease. Why? The current options are prescriptive, focused on one or two areas of health, and lack a sense of camaraderie and accountability. Enter Viva: a solution to shape the future of preventative health. Viva community centers empower urban women to reduce chronic stress and gain self-awareness through holistic health lifestyle management. Viva’s tech-enabled wellness clubs offer holistic health & wellness education, online and offline resources and community-building to help shift mindsets and create sustainable behavior change. Viva is providing a personalized, accessible and social way to find the lifestyle that makes you the healthiest and happiest version of yourself.

ENERGY & RESOURCE ALTERNATIVES

RePurpose Energy (1st Place)
Team Members: Ryan Barr, Joseph Lacap
School: UC Davis
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, solar’s long-term success “depends on the cost-effective integration of energy storage”. Already, excess solar power is often wasted, and California is only a third of the way to its 100% clean energy target. Achievement of this bold goal will require energy storage at scale to harness solar power after sunset. Meanwhile, California will have 5 million electric vehicles on its roads by 2030. Recycling their batteries is expensive, but reuse is economical; over 75% of an EV battery’s original capacity typically remains at the end of its useful life in a vehicle. RePurpose Energy tests, reassembles, and redeploys used electric vehicle batteries to provide commercial solar developers with energy storage solutions at half the cost of new battery alternatives, so they can offer more electricity bill savings, and California can accomplish its clean energy goals.
Wet Technik (2nd Place)
Team Members: Dennis Ssekimpi, Mark Musinguzi, Nina Shatsi
School: Makerere University
Wet Technik is a student startup founded at Makerere University looking at reducing the costs of water usage and environmental pollution by hazardous wastewater through the use of constructed wetlands. The team is comprised of three students from a multi-disciplinary background with a shared passion for solving the ever-present problem around wastewater handling and to bring to light the potential of its recycling. Through using a mixture of waste bottle caps and pumice in the constructed wetland, Wet Technik has proven that it will reduce the area requirements, making this system even more accessible to factories, schools and eventually households. The constructed wetland is already the cheapest and easiest way to maintain a system to recycle grey water making it very attractive to people in Uganda.
The Berkeley-India Stove Project: Improving Women’s Lives with Improved Cookstoves in Rural India (3rd Place)
Team Members: Samantha Hing, Matthew Mayes
School: UC Berkeley
The ultimate goal of the Berkeley India Stove (BIS) Project is to deliver the BIS into the hands of the poorest 830 million people in India suffering from exposure to indoor air pollution due to their daily use of inefficient biomass cookstoves. An essential component of the project is to ensure the sustained adoption and long-term usage of the BIS, which reduces smoke emissions and fuelwood consumption by as much as 50% compared to traditional Indian stoves. The BIS is one of the best available cookstoves in the Indian market considering a performance to price ratio. Bolstered by strong partnerships on the ground and a comprehensive business plan, including innovative strategies for dissemination and monitoring, the BIS has the potential to dramatically curtail the harmful impacts of this critical environmental, health, and socioeconomic issue caused by inefficient stoves.
DissolvBio (3rd Place)
Team Members: Ryan Kenneally, William Sharpless, Hannah Grossman, Jason Hou
School: UC Berkeley
Billions of pounds of polyethylene are produced each year, and unfortunately this compound can take thousands of years to break down. Polyethylene has also been linked to human cancers, groundwater toxification, and environmental damage. A reliable means of breaking down polyethylene is necessary and would have a huge impact. Unfortunately, microbial degradation of polyethylene is not common in nature. Polyethylene has been around for less than 100 years and enzyme evolution takes millennia, so microbes have not had enough time to develop this ability. However, recent techniques in Directed Evolution allow researchers to take evolution into the lab and speed it up to thousands of times its natural rate. This project proposes to apply Directed Evolution techniques to a specific enzyme tied to polyethylene degradation in order to create a novel enzyme capable of degrading polyethylene efficiently and reducing global plastic waste.

FOOD SYSTEMS

Intelligent Bugs Mapping and Wiping (iBMW): An affordable robot for farmers (1st Place)
Team Members: Haoyu Niu, Tiebiao Zhao
School: UC Merced
This project idea is to develop an intelligent bugs mapping and wiping (iBMW) robot to perform pest population spatial distribution and “surgical precision spraying” for pest wipeout. The iBMW is an affordable (less than $1,000) robot-driven robot, which has a Turtlebot 3 as the robot’s brain and an unmanned ground vehicle serving as the work platform. Based on the design, the robot will be able to recognize and classify the Navel orangeworm by using deep learning neural networks. In addition, several iBMWs can work in the field together in swarming mode day and night, so that it can realize temporal and spatial bug mapping. As a result, mapping can determine which areas are at the greatest risk and whether wiping treatment is needed by iBMWs.
Chap-Dryer (2nd Place)
Team Members: Morris Atuhwera, George Komakeck
School: Makerere University
Unlike other poly-tunnel solar dryers in the market that use steel frames and metallic base plates, Chap-Dyer uses moisture resistant eucalyptus poles as frames and rough stone slates as a base. These materials are readily available in all parts of Uganda and very affordable, reducing the total cost of a dryer from $1,000 to $200 for an 18 cubic meter drying space. The use of stone slates instead of steel plates allows for the dryer to perform optimally during day time and night time, drying twice as fast as the standard poly-tunnel dryer in the market. Unlike steel frames that require precise engineering and fabrication for easy assembly on site, Chap-Dryer which uses eucalyptus and stones requires simple carpentry and masonry joinery techniques which takes less labor cost and minimal electric power cost as all components can be fabricated and assembled on site.
Okaranchi (3rd Place)
Team Members: Vy Phung, Gary Adrian, Jeremy Chuardy, Chia-Yung Su, Siriyakorn Chantieng
School: UC Davis
Okara is known as a soy pulp by-product generated when processing soy-based products. While okara still contains high nutrition values, most of it is dumped into landfills where it creates greenhouse gas emissions, causing environmental concerns. Okaranchi crackers aims to alleviate the global food waste issue by introducing consumers to a nutritious, sustainable and innovative snacking alternative. This appetite-fulfilling cracker is gluten-free, rich in protein and fiber, and low in high-glycemic carbohydrates, all of which meet conscious consumers’ concerns when making food purchases. Okaranchi can be consumed as its own snack, eaten as a crunchy component in soup and salad, or paired with dippings, spreads, nut butter, and even fruit, cheese, and wine. Through appealing and informative packaging, a sustainability-focused vision, and education outreach, consumers will realize that they are doing good to both their bodies and the environment through their purchase of Okaranchi.

GLOBAL HEALTH

Cloud-based Emergency Response System (1st Place)
Team Members: Moses Kintu, Jordan Ongwech, Trevor Nagaba
School: Makerere University
Uganda does not have a dedicated emergency response number despite repeated government attempts to set up an adequate and reliable public ambulance service backed by a toll free phone number for communication. This has resulted in slow emergency response times, additional injury and an altogether diminished chance of survival. The Cloud-based Emergency Response System (CERS) enables real time matching of ambulances to patients allowing for maximum utilization of the limited resources that exist. At the same time, it provides a means to circumvent the problem of insufficient resources to setup and man a dedicated emergency call centre with which the Kampala Capital City Authority has been wrestling for some time. Through a smartphone application, users can request and automatically connect with the closest available ambulance. CERS has the potential to impact 40,000 Ugandans who do not make it to the hospital within the “golden hour” by providing a fast, safe and appropriate transport means.
ReEMS: Revolutionized Emergency Medical Services (1st Place)
Team Members: Leon Wu, Timothy Lam, A. Sterling Christensen, Ramin Atrian, Zhaoyi Li, Kaung Yang, Kousha Changizi, Andrew Sanchez
School: UC San Diego
The Red Cross of Tijuana is a nonprofit medical services provider that covers 98% of the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) requests in Tijuana, Mexico. They pilot only 17 ambulances to serve a population exceeding 1.8 million people. As a result, these conditions escalate emergency vehicle response times and impair EMS performance during everyday operations. Partnered with the Red Cross of Tijuana, ReEMS (Revolutionized Emergency Medical Services) aims to optimize the delivery and management of emergency services in Tijuana and other underserved communities worldwide by introducing cost-effective smartphone and cloud software. Their platform enables emergency medical personnel to make informed decisions during dispatch by providing them with tools to monitor, visualize, and dispatch EMS vehicles in real time. ReEMS expects to decrease EMS vehicle response durations by over 50%, improving access to and reliability of health care for millions of people in underserved communities.
Solving the Arsenic Problem in Rural California (3rd Place)
Team Members: Dana Hernandez, Siva Rama Satyam Bandaru, Lucas Duffy, JP Daniel
School: UC Berkeley
About 55,000 people in California rely on arsenic contaminated groundwater as their primary source of drinking water. The small water systems serving these disadvantaged communities lack the technical, managerial, and financial capacity to implement a sustainable solution that would provide arsenic-safe drinking water. Thus, there is a need for an affordable, compact, and continuous-flow technology for these communities exposed to arsenic, a potent carcinogen. Air Cathode Assisted Iron Electrocoagulation (ACAIE) effectively removes high arsenic concentrations from synthetic groundwater to levels below EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Level of 10 parts per billion. Conducting a pilot study at a school site will demonstrate the technical efficacy and robustness of ACAIE. In addition, an educational campaign will increase public awareness and knowledge on the arsenic problem in rural California, empowering rural communities that currently lack their human right to safe drinking water.
Carenea: Redefining the Storage of Cornea Transplants (Honorable Mention)
Team Members: Christina Kong, Shreya Condamoor
School: UC Irvine
The standard for corneal storage requires preservation in solutions at 4 degrees Celsius for a maximum of 7-14 days. In developing countries, eye banks struggle with proper refrigeration and the high demand for corneas. They often resort to importing corneas, which are costly and have a shorter shelf life due to transport time. As a result, there is a critical shortage of corneas with 1 cornea for every 70 individuals in need. Micronanobubbles (MNBs) are gaseous vehicles that can carry oxygen within solutions for a prolonged period of time. In transplant solutions, MNBs may meet the oxygen demand of corneal cells, increasing cell survival and extending corneal shelf life. Increased oxygenation may also decrease the need for refrigeration as cells at room temperature, which have higher metabolic demand, would have enough oxygen. If eye banks in developing countries have MNBs, more patients may get the care they need.
TyphGen; A Better Point Of Care Diagnostic For Typhoid Fever (Honorable Mention)
Team Members: Sharon Bright Amanya, Rendani Manenzhe, Brenda Nakandi, Brian Nyiro, Joshua Obura
School: Makerere University
Typhoid remains a major public health threat in Uganda contributing to 36% of all fever-related illnesses. It was responsible for the outbreak that affected over 1,000 individuals within Kampala city in 2015. Typhoid is a curable disease with good treatment outcomes if the diagnosis is made early. However, in Uganda there are major challenges with diagnostics. The most widely used test (Widal test) has low accuracy (5.7%) and the World Health Organization has discouraged its use, while the gold standard test (Bacterial culture) takes several days to produce results, is expensive and not readily available. This ultimately leads to delay of appropriate treatment, long waiting hours and inappropriate use of antibiotics that could potentially lead to drug resistance. The Big Idea is to develop TyphGen, a point of care diagnostic that uses DNA detection techniques to diagnose Typhoid in 90 minutes with >90% accuracy at an estimated cost of $12 per test.

HARDWARE FOR GOOD

Respira Labs (1st Place)
Team Members: Nikhil Chacko, Nerjada Maksutaj, Maria Artunduaga
School: UC Berkeley
Today, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) affects 25 million Americans and costs the healthcare system nearly $50 billion a year. Respira Labs’ COPD management platform is based on a novel technology which instead of merely listening for changes in breathing like other wearable tools, emits sound from small sensors to capture personalized lung volume profiles based on resonance. This allows the technology to detect air trappings (abnormal increase in volume of residual air in the lungs after exhalation) which signals an exacerbation. Intelligent algorithms will flag patients in danger of readmission before acute symptoms arise, enable home-based intervention, cut hospital readmission costs, and reduce provider and payer healthcare bills. Initial customers will include heads of telemedicine who run hospital remote patient monitoring systems and who will champion adoption of the Respira Labs solution. Platform users are primary care physicians, pulmonologists, nurse practitioners, respiratory therapists, and post-hospital discharge COPD patients.

Isochoric Organ Preservation System: A Thermodynamic Approach to Saving Lives (2nd Place)
Team Members: Alvina Kam, Matthew Powell-Palm, Gideon Ukpai
School: UC Berkeley
Of the over 114,000 patients in the United States on the national transplant list, twenty die every day while waiting for an organ transplant, and every ten minutes another patient is added. Due to shortcomings in current organ preservation techniques, transplantation is prohibitively expensive, limited geographically to areas with large donor pools, and incredibly inefficient. This is driven by the short window of viability of organs after removal, on the order of four to six hours for hearts and lungs. Extending this viability from a few hours to a few days could transform the accessibility and affordability of organ transplantation, and could prevent up to 30% of all deaths in the US. The team has developed a novel solid-state device based on emergent thermodynamic principles. The isochoric cryopreservation chamber is capable of preserving live organs for long periods of time, which the team believes has the potential to transform the modern medical industry.
Sonic Eyewear Project (2nd Place)
Team Members: Darryl Diptee, Jack Wallis, Arnav Gulati, Fatima Perez Sastre
School: UC Berkeley
1.3 million people suffered from blindness in America in 2010 and that number is expected to triple by 2050. Many blind people click with their tongue as a means of soliciting echos from the environment which are processed by their brain and used to locate objects and navigate. While it has been shown to be extremely effective, the technique is difficult to master. The optimal clicking frequency is a critical part of the technique and is a challenge for many to learn. Sonic Eyewear looks like a regular pair of sunglasses that automates the clicking process by generating the optimal frequency of clicks on-demand. It sends forward-looking directional clicks when the user lightly taps her jaw to activate the signal. The technology leverages the power of the human brain to perform echolocation, which competitors have failed to do.
Fractal: Acoustic detection and monitoring of bone fractures (3rd Place)
Team Members: Emily Huynh
School: UC Berkeley
Two-thirds of the world lacks access to basic medical imaging equipment, which is an essential cornerstone for modern medical diagnostics. Due in part to a lack of access to basic x-ray technology in two-thirds of the world, fractures often mean a lifelong disability with devastating socioeconomic complications. In order to mitigate this gap in healthcare, Fractal provides underdeveloped countries and remote settings with an inexpensive, trusted tool for diagnosing and monitoring bone fractures. Fractal sends an acoustic signal through the bone, which is analyzed for sound transmission and frequency changes. The device is currently being tested on patients at the University of California, San Francisco with the aim to facilitate better care and outcomes for patients with plans for further development.
Project Sparthan (3rd Place)
Team Members: Davide Asnaghi, Alex Wong
School: UC Berkeley
More than 3,000 children are born every year with a congenital limb deficiency in the United States alone. These children will change their prosthetics devices once every 6 months, making the purchase of a high-end prosthesis unaffordable for most families. Affordable 3D printers have spawned numerous customizable and very affordable prosthetic hand models. These devices can be modified to fit the children as they grow, at a relatively low price. However, these prosthetic hands leave a lot to be desired in terms of functionality. Most of these devices can only allow coarse finger control, placing it in stark contrast to commercial automatic hands. The Project Sparthan team is committed to taking the concept of modular prosthetics a step further, continuing to bridge the gap between expensive robotic arms and 3D printed prosthesis. This will be done through the design and development of Sparthan, a modular electronics kit, compatible with existing prosthetic hand models, which will enable intuitive hand control.

WORKFORCE EDUCATION & DEVELOPMENT

Doin’ Good: Mobile Makerspace & Education Center (1st Place)
Team Members: Payton Goodrich, Malte Hofmann, Jonas Michalzik
School: UC Berkeley
Of the ~200,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon between the ages of 18 and 25 years, only 4% have access to formal education. Many of the current education programs do not focus on hands-on technical education and are not designed to reach the remote areas, where most refugees live. The innovative approach to these challenges is a mobile makerspace & education center (MMEC). The MMEC will take form as a van equipped with tools and materials that drives to different settlements to teach young refugees craftsmanship skills, for example in woodworking or sewing. This will enable the participants to learn the skills required to seek employment, while at the same time building items they need to improve the living conditions in the camps, such as furniture or toys. The program intends to provide a novel, highly individualized approach to education for underserved populations.
My Earth (2nd Place)
Team Members: Cara Nolan, Jennifer Liu, Tamar Saunders
School: UC Berkeley
My Earth is a social enterprise that provides training and employment for Australia’s remote Indigenous communities in the construction industry. My Earth engages local people to construct low-cost but high-quality, environmentally-sustainable housing. It uses locally-sourced soil as the primary building material, in a technique called Compressed Earth Block (CEB) technology. This construction technique has been demonstrated in East Africa, but not widely adopted in Australia. CEB is a low-skill construction technique, which enables My Earth to engage people who may have missed out on a good education. The program uses a flexible, tiered training and employment model to lower the barriers to entry into the labor market. It starts with brick pressing and a builder-trainer program, and ultimately ongoing employment in local construction and maintenance. Its flexibility, direct linkage to a job pipeline, and commitment to community involvement, sets it apart from traditional remote workforce development projects.
Thrive Education (3rd Place)
Team Members: Jack Rolo, Joshua Curry, Meryll Dindin, Jolie Lam
School: UC Berkeley
Thrive is reinventing the evaluation process for Learning Differences (LDs) to unlock the incredible potential of students with LDs. Thrive provides comprehensive video evaluations for LDs, using Masters/PhD level psychology students to complete the bulk of the work (roughly 4 hours per test between the test administration and 15-page report write up), while limiting the very expensive post-PhD psychologists’ time to roughly 30 minutes of ‘interpreting’ the results. This reorganization of the testing-supply chain, enabled by the tests being administered via video-conferencing, allows for huge cost savings and dramatically increases access. Additionally, Thrive is implementing machine learning on top of the evaluation data extracted from videos to enable higher-accuracy evaluations than any current method. This technology will drastically drive down both the cost of evaluations and the misdiagnosis rate and will reveal an unprecedented level of insight into LDs.

SCALING UP BIG IDEAS

Pit Vidura: Building the “Uber Pool” for Fecal Sludge Management (1st Place)
Team Members: Rachel Sklar, Sarah Lebu
School: UC Berkeley
In rapidly urbanizing areas, small exhauster truck businesses are unable to keep up with the demand for pit latrine emptying services due to inefficiencies in their operations. Thus, when a latrine fills in most low-income urban areas, manual emptiers use buckets to empty the waste and dump it in the environment. This results in high rates of diseases such as cholera and dysentery. Pit Vidura enables sanitation service providers to grow their businesses by improving the efficiency and profitability of their daily operations. Pit Vidura’s integrated suite of technologies connects truckers to customers, intelligently routes truckers to clusters of customers, and streamlines payments for emptying services. To date (March 2019), Pit Vidura has served over 1,200 households in Kigali with safe emptying services and prevented over 3 million liters of human waste from entering the urban environment.
Trash to Tiles (1st Place)
Team Members: Paige Balcom, Jeremy Lan, Stephanie Solove
School: UC Berkeley
Ugandans have second or third tier roofs. Trash to Tiles (T3) is repurposing plastic waste in developing nations to produce affordable, quality construction materials such as roofing tiles, pipes, and pavers. By operating in areas with large amounts of plastic waste but no access to recycling, T3 provides a recycling option that currently does not exist. T3’s locally fabricated, precision-controlled machinery fills the gap between capital-intensive, industrialized manufacturers and low-tech NGOs struggling to expand. T3 will scale rapidly and empower local entrepreneurs through a franchise model. In the pilot market of Gulu, Uganda, T3 created prototype roofing tiles and pavers and confirmed market demand through 200 interviews. T3 is currently developing the second iteration machinery and establishing a community plastics collection center to provide a steady supply of plastic waste.
Visualize (1st Place)
Team Members: Julia Kramer, Maria Young
School: UC Berkeley
Visualize is a simulated training tool designed to train midwives in Ghana to screen for cervical cancer using the most appropriate and accessible screening method, visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA). Using a simulated tool is a novel approach to improve learning and retention of cervical cancer screening methods in low- and middle-income countries. Leveraging funding from a previous Big Ideas grant, Visualize was co-designed with midwives in Ghana and has gone through multiple design iterations, based on feedback from Ghanaian midwives, trainers, OB/GYN doctors, and healthcare administrators at every stage. Now the team aims to scale Visualize by implementing and testing this simulated training tool as part of VIA training sessions at three urban health training facilities. During these sessions, trainers will use Visualize to teach midwives how to perform VIA. The midwives will then be able to screen patients using VIA.
ZestBio (1st Place)
Team Members: Luke Latimer, Ryan Protzko
School: UC Berkeley
ZestBio is a startup spun out of UC Berkeley that is harnessing the power of biology to convert low value, abundant fruit and vegetable byproducts like citrus peels and sugar beet pulp into high performing plastic bottles and ingredients for dishwasher detergents. This proposal aims to build off recent business and technical advances to scale the improved fermentation technology from bench to pilot scale. At scale, ZestBio aims to make products with superior performance and dramatically reduced environmental footprint compared to existing solutions.
Spotlight On Hope Film Camp (Honorable Mention)
Team Members: Cassie Nguyen, Ally Nguyen, Nhi Trinh
School: UC Riverside
Spotlight On Hope is free-of-cost and offers a unique and creative outlet through film and animation instruction for pediatric and young adult cancer patients and their families. Spotlight On Hope brings excitement, enjoyment and relaxation to patients through film production, enhancing their mental well-being, self-worth and skills during a particularly stressful and traumatic time of their lives. After 8-10 weekend film workshops have been carried out over the course of the year, a grand red carpet screening showcasing all the films is held for the participants, their families and friends, and the community to enjoy.

Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day Showcases Inventions of Top Student Teams

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.

Click on image to RSVP

In 2006, the Big Ideas Contest launched at UC Berkeley to catalyze and support an interdisciplinary and diverse network of student entrepreneurs to develop game-changing innovations. No longer would entrepreneurship be ensconced within just engineering and business schools and accessible to only a few. The time had come to “open-source” entrepreneurship to include the range of perspectives and interdisciplinary expertise necessary to develop well-rounded solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.

With support from the Rudd Family Foundation, the Big Ideas Contest has expanded significantly since that time. To date, over 5,000 students have participated, from 85 different majors, collaborating on over 2,400 proposals. Big Ideas has awarded $2.7 million in prizes across 500 winning teams. These teams have used this modest seed funding—and the targeted mentorship provided by a network of over 1,500 judges, mentors, and sponsors—to collectively secure over $650 million in additional investment for for-profit enterprises, nonprofit organizations, hybrid entities, and community-based initiatives. Big Ideas has made good on its vision.

This year Big Ideas received a record 336 applications representing more than 1,000 students, across 12 universities and more than 85 majors. More than 65 percent of these applicants were undergraduates and 50 percent were women. The diversity of the applicant pool is equaled by the breadth of innovations: a new hardware innovation that monitors bone fractures using acoustics; a provocative art installation to raise awareness of implicit biases; the creation of a novel enzyme capable of degrading plastics and reducing waste; a groundbreaking process for reducing corneal blindness by using “micro-nanobubbles.”

2018 Big Ideas Grand Prize Winner Rachel Sklar, presents at Pitch Day

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 (RSVP).

Over the last eight months, these teams and the other 329 applicants have taken advantage of workshops, mentorship, and advising, receiving tailored feedback, networking opportunities, and pathways to set goals and iterate on their ideas. Among the highlights for the 2018-2019 Contest were the fall and spring Inventing Green Workshop: Exploring Sustainable Design featuring Jeremy Faludi and the environmental responsibility enhancement of the Hardware for Good category, supported by The Lemelson Foundation.

“These new Big Ideas activities directly align with The Lemelson Foundation’s mission to use the power of invention to improve lives, by inspiring and enabling the next generation of inventors and invention-based enterprises to promote environmentally responsible economic growth and social progress around the world,” said Cindy Cooper, program officer at The Lemelson Foundation. “We are looking forward to meeting the 2019 winners.”

A future used electric vehicle battery product of RePurpose Energy

One Pitch Day participant is RePurpose Energy, led by UC Davis engineering student Ryan Barr. Repurpose aims to develop a new energy storage solution by harnessing the energy of used electric vehicle batteries, tackling two Grand Challenges at once: California’s 100 percent clean energy target and the growing need to reduce EV battery waste. (View video for more detail.)

“The Big Ideas process turned our idea into a plan,” says Barr.  “It challenges participants to develop innovative yet feasible solutions to society’s gnarliest issues. We look forward to inspiring the Pitch Day audience with our climate change solution.”

Sketch of the Isochoric Preservation Chamber developed by a UC Berkeley student team

Isochoric Preservation System, a group developing an isochoric cryopreservation chamber capable of preserving live organs up to 72 hours (from 4-6 hours) will also get a chance at the $5000 prize. Led by Alvina Kam, a UC Berkeley Materials Science Master student, the team aims to transform the accessibility and affordability of organ transplantation and prevent up to an estimated 30 percent of all deaths in the U.S. (View video for more detail.)

“We entered the Big Ideas Contest with a big idea for how to solve an even bigger problem,” said Kam. “The competition has helped tremendously in our effort to refine this idea into something concrete, exciting, and perhaps most importantly achievable. We’ve also learned at every turn just how important it is (and how difficult it can be) to communicate abstract scientific concepts with clarity and context.”

Pitch Day Teams

Cloud-based Emergency Response System (CERS): A mobile application that enables real time matching of ambulances to patients in Kampala, Uganda. (Makerere University)
Intelligent Bugs Mapping and Wiping: An affordable, unmanned ground vehicle that uses machine learning to recognize and spatially map agricultural pests. (UC Merced)
Isochoric Preservation System: Extends the preservation of live organs up to 72 hours, thus transforming the accessibility of organ transplantation. (UC Berkeley)
Kaloum Bankhi: A durable and culturally appropriate housing solution for residents in Kaloum, Guinea. (UC Berkeley)
Qloak: A hub for information about spaces that have been proven to support the LGBTQ+ community (businesses, restaurants, doctors, etc.). (UC Berkeley)
RePurpose Energy: Tests, reassembles, and redeploys used electric vehicle batteries to provide commercial solar developers with more affordable energy storage solutions. (UC Davis)
Respira Labs: A platform to monitor and manage Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) using wearable sensors and machine learning. (UC Berkeley)

The Big Ideas Contest is grateful for the vision and generosity of these remarkable sponsors:  Rudd Family Foundation, Autodesk Foundation, Lemelson Foundation, USAID, Blum Center for Developing Economies, University of California Office of the President, Associated Students University of California, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.

Big Ideas Winner Po Jui “Ray” Chiu, co-founder of BioInspira Inc., named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy category

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.

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. They won first place in the category of “Innovation Technologies for Society.”

Big Ideas Innovation Ambassadors Nurturing Ideas into Enterprises

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.

Maria Artunduaga’s Mission to Manage Chronic Lung Disease

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.”