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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.

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.

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.”

By Tamara Straus

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 truck “a couple tons” of wet navel peel to Protzko’s lab free of charge.

Protzko, co-founder of the green chemistry startup ZestBio, tells this story to widen people’s eyes to the gargantuan amount of agricultural waste produced on Earth. Up to 50 percent of citrus fruit, potato, sugar beet, and grape weight is made up of wasted matter: peels, pulps, and pomace—and that matter comprises only 10 percent of the crops’ value.

In numeracy, citrus pulp and peel alone generate 10 million metric tons of waste worldwide every year. Much of it is reused as feed to cattle, but this requires an energy-intensive process. Peels that are not dried can end up in piles of putrefying waste that cause environmental damage to local waterways and release greenhouse gases, particularly methane. It makes one guilty to drink a glass of orange juice.

Nonetheless, the free citrus pulp offer was confirmation for Protzko and his ZestBio partners—Luke Latimer, who received his PhD in chemistry from Cal in 2017, and UC Berkeley Bioengineering Associate Professor John Dueber—that the raw materials they needed were more than available. What they also soon discovered was that agricultural producers are keen to collaborate on green chemistry products which repurpose their waste, increase their crop value, and reduce emissions by repurposing peel, pulp, and pomace for viable and especially non-oil-based products.

“Just the idea of taking agricultural waste and turning it into something else was exciting to producers,” explained Protzko to the sound of a whirring fermentation shakers in his lab at Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Building. “It took us some time to figure out what we should do and what might be economically viable—but that eventually came from talking to big chemical manufacturers and from the industry responses to our academic paper.”

That academic paper demonstrated the possibility of using engineered yeast to convert pectin-rich orange peel waste into plastic bottles. It is an advance enabled by the last 10 years of metabolic engineering, says Protzko. ZestBio’s goal is to use yeast to make chemical building blocks, which include the plastic polyethylene furanoate (PEF)—a bio-based plastic produced from agricultural waste. The team is one step closer to that goal, as demonstrated in a November 2018 Nature Communications paper, in which the researchers solved challenges associated with engineering a microbial strain to convert pectin-rich hydrolysates into commodity and specialty chemicals.

The Nature Communications paper lands a week after one of California’s most extreme environmental disasters—the Butte County fires, which have been attributed to fossil fuel-driven climate change and which covered the Energy Biosciences Institute in smoke the day of the ZestBio interview. Among the advantages of PEF, says Protzko, is reducing reliance on its chemical cousin, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), found in food packaging and plastic drink bottles. Indeed, when it comes to bottles, an environmentally sustainable solution is in demand. A Pacific Institute study found that approximately 17 million barrels of oil equivalent were needed to produce the plastic water bottles consumed by Americans in 2006—enough energy to fuel more than one million cars for a year.

“Waste causes environmental issues,” says Protzko. “If we can create sustainable products then we’re actually replacing oil and other unsustainable resources.”

ZestBio is part of an increasing number of bioscience startups in the Berkeley area—including  Zymergen, Lygos, Amyris, Zymochem, Sugarlogix, Visolis, and Bolt Threads—that have received support from the Energy Biosciences Institute (a BP-funded partnership of UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute, a research partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2007, more than 1,000 researchers have been supported, creating what Protzko calls a “thriving community of Berkeley-based startups involved in bioscience for environmental solutions.”

The cell and molecular biologist from Baltimore did not always see himself as an entrepreneur. It was his co-founder and fellow doctoral student Luke Latimer who pushed him to see their PEF research as a business. Their first step, says Protzko, was to apply to the Big Ideas student innovation contest in the fall of 2016.

“Big Ideas was what jump-started everything for us,” says Protzko. “It forced us to think through step by step what everything would look like and develop a foundation for the company. It was our first time transitioning from being just graduate students to thinking about the bigger impacts we could have.”

Latimer and Protzko submitted their pre-proposal in November 2016 and were assigned an advisor, Tony Kingsbury, from the plastics industry, “who was really great about letting us know what challenges we’d be looking forward to. He forced us to think about different products.” The ZestBio team won first place in the Energy & Resource Alternatives category in May 2017.

Since that time, ZestBio has received pre-seed capital from the National Science Foundation’s SBIR/STTR program and is participating in Berkeley’s prestigious Skydeck accelerator program.

“NSF really pushes customer discovery and commercialization. They go after high risk, high reward for Phase 1. What we’re proposing—we definitely know it’s high risk, high reward, because it’s never been done before.”

The ZestBio team is in conversation with Method and other green products formulators to share research information on its bottle composition process and household cleaning ingredient possibilities. The team aims to have its bio-based bottle on the shelf in five years. In 10 years, says Protzko, the team wants to expand its production beyond eco-friendly bottles to include different vegetable processing and products for multiple producers.
“This is also a global issue,” says Protzko. “Over 60 percent of oranges that are juiced are in Brazil. That would be an incredible market to tap into when we have a refined process to do it.”

By Veena Narashiman ’2020

Early years of childhood form the basis of intelligence, personality, social behavior, and capacity to learn and nurture oneself. Increasingly, child development researchers are also finding that brain development during the first eight years is the most rapid, with children who receive attention in their early years achieving more success in school.

Sneha Sheth (Berkeley Haas MBA ’2016) knew these facts, having designed international programs for women’s empowerment and education for Dalberg, Education Pioneers, and Teach For India. She understood that early education in India was often neglected due to high rates of poverty and illiteracy–and that the nation holds many of the 200 million children in developing countries at risk of not reaching their full potential.

“I met hundreds of mothers, who had never gone to school,” said Sheth of her time working in a Mumbai slum. “They were willing to do whatever it took to get their kids a great education, but they weren’t really sure how. They would often ask me, ‘Well, I didn’t go to school, what can I really do about this?’”

While pursuing an MBA at Cal, Sheth began to think about an education technology project that could serve low-income Indian parents. During the summer of 2015, she and Sindhuja Jeyabal, who was completing a master’s degree at the UC Berkeley School of Information, piloted DOST, meaning friend in Hindi.

Sheth and Jeyabal then turned to the Big Ideas student innovation contest for development and feedback. Their Big Ideas mentor, Anthony Bloome, a senior education technology specialist at USAID, encouraged their ambition to come up with a solution for early childhood development in India. Big Ideas allowed Sheth and Jeyabal to iron out their implementation plan. In May 2016, DOST won in the Mobiles for Reading category.

Soon after, DOST was named one of the Top Three Edtech Startups in 2016 by the Unitus Seed Fund, followed by an invitation to join Y Combinator. In 2017, the team returned to Big Ideas, winning third place in the Scaling Up competition. The nonprofit’s supporters now include the Mulago Foundation, the David Weekley Family Foundation, and the Chintu Gudiya Foundation, among others.

The path to creating DOST was iterative, said Sheth. “At first, we talked to parents about how those who can’t read can still have a lot of weight in early childhood education. We had to show parents that playing, singing, and talking with their kids was a form of education.”

Sheth and Jeyabal recognized a major challenge was getting busy families to come to DOST early education classes. “You can’t change behavior in one session, and you can’t see changes penetrate in a community in just one session,” said Sheth. Even if one parent was able to attend sessions—and it was often the mothers—DOST wanted to involve fathers, grandparents, aunts, and other extended family members in lesson plans. When the team was brainstorming ideas for a practical approach to this problem, they finally asked, What if we just call them?

Due to the widespread use of Nokia cellphones, Sheth and Jeyabal began to consider a technological approach to parent learning. Sending podcasts to parents, they realized, would allow DOST to serve many families and grow rapidly. Parents also wouldn’t need to make the tough decision of deciding between attending a parenting class or cooking dinner.

DOST began to develop 1- to 2-minute daily lesson plans and verbal activities as podcasts deliverable to parents’ phones, allowing busy mothers and fathers to integrate their child’s early development into their daily lives. The audio programs instruct parents to teach basic literacy and numeracy. The first audio program is 24 weeks long, and is targeted at parents of children who are two- to six-years of age. As of October 2018, there are 20,000 Indian caregivers using DOST every day, a figure that has grown 100 times in the last two years.

One of the first lesson plans featured how parents could speak to their children without intimidation. By trying a collaborative approach rather than a violent one, parents reported their children were more receptive to instructions and guidance. One of DOST’s most popular mini podcasts encourages mothers to make rotis in different shapes for dinner—fostering pre-numeracy skills at a young age.

To build awareness for DOST, the nonprofit has hired mothers from the communities it targets. “DOST Champions see the untapped potential in their own community and know how to convince their neighbors to join DOST,” said Sheth. “It’s also a plus to create employment in the areas we work in.”

Ultimately DOST’s mission is to provide uneducated parents with the resources to enable their children to excel. “Whether it’s by categorizing rotis as big or small during cooking or naming the colors in a sari,” said Sheth, “these kids will be more prepared for their future.”

By Veena Narashiman ’20

Basic surgeries are far from basic. They require approximately 50 tools, which take about 2 minutes each for an experienced technician to clean. Operations in a trauma unit require as many as 400 tools. And in both environments, surgical tools can be easily misplaced, thrown away, or misassembled. In fact in the U.S. alone, busy surgical teams inadvertently leave an instrument inside a patient about 1,500 times a year.

Solving the problem of surgical tool tracking is the focus of VIDI, a startup launched in November 2017 by Federico Alvarez del Blanco (’18 UC Berkeley MBA), John Kim (PhD ’18 UC Berkeley/UCSF Bioengineering), Hector Neira, (PhD ’18 UC Berkeley/UCSF Bioengineering), and Robert Kim (PhD candidate, UCSD MD/PhD, Neuroscience)—which received a Big Ideas 2nd place award in May in the Hardware for Good category.

The group of Cal students were inspired by a campus workshop on visual recognition sponsored by information technology company NEC. They began to realize that the same machine learning technologies being deployed for self-driving cars could be used to increase hospital efficiency by tracking the flow of sterilization tools used in operations and thus minimizing medical errors.

VIDI (which means “see” in Latin) is being developed to do the following: As technicians prepare instruments before a procedure, a camera facing the surgical tray tracks where each tool goes and ensures the number of tools present in the beginning remains constant throughout the process. When a tool goes missing, the technology alerts technicians of a possible error.
Neria, Kim, del Blanco, and Kim initially decided to target hospitals’ Central Processing Departments, where most tools are sterilized, since this area is more accessible than operating rooms. “We figured it was a good place to start. The less high stakes for a prototype, the better,” said John Kim. The team also realized sterilization operators are vastly underappreciated and underpaid, even though they are expected to enable fast turnover of surgical tools. “These technicians don’t stay in the same hospitals for a long time, because they burn out quickly. Also, every hospital has a different technique and different name for their procedures. It’s super easy to get confused and make a mistake as an operator,” added Kim.

Yet the focus on the Central Processing Departments did not yield enough information about tool loss. So the VIDI team members turned their attention to the surgical room. By placing a table top camera facing the surgical tray (filled with cleaned instruments), VIDI was able to automatically catalog the tools, a feature that cuts the operator’s time by half.

To further their idea, Hector Neria, John Kim, and Robert Kim participated in the National Science Foundation I-Corps, and conducted upwards of 100 interviews to understand the state of the medical field. From there, they entered the Haas NEC Innovative Solutions Fair, where they partnered with MBA student Federico Alvarez del Blanco, and subsequently won first place. Throughout the process, they explored new markets.

Said John Kim: “Our initial motivation was to tackle the issue of surgical tools being left in patients [a term called RSI], but that only accounts for 5 percent of all misuses… It’s not a huge market. We discovered that tracking the instruments was not well managed, and hospitals were having a hard time converting to new tools.”

At this stage, they were ready for Big Ideas ideation and mentorship.

“Previous competitions were mainly focused on customer discovery,” said Kim. “We needed Big Ideas to receive feedback on our value proposition, and this feedback helped us understand more about our competitors and where they lie in the market.”

With the help of their Big Ideas mentor, product development specialist Bayan M. Qandil, they began to frame their business proposal. “One of our biggest hurdles was determining hospital workflow, and where VIDI fits in [it],” said Kim. “Big Ideas allowed us to experience the hospital atmosphere more intimately, so we could understand of how the day-to-day works. Their feedback was invaluable.”

One of their main takeaways and pivot points began with the realization that unlike other companies, VIDI users wouldn’t be the ones buying the product. In fact, the financial decision makers—hospital administrators—would never touch VIDI, yet they were still the people the team has to convince. “It’s a tricky situation to be in, but ultimately a good challenge,” said Kim. “Interviewing technicians from UCSF and the CEO of John Muir’s Medical Center helped us understand the balance of things. Hospitals realize the gravity of surgical mistakes and want to eliminate them. ”

VIDI now has the capability to detect 50 surgical instruments in a hospital setting. In September, they were chosen as finalists in the 2018 Collegiate Inventors Competition, which rewards innovation and research conducted by college students and their faculty advisers. They’ll be traveling to Virginia in November for the final round, in the hope to receive funding to advance their project.

The VIDI  team, which chose its name from Julius Caesar’s saying veni vidi vici, is not shy about its excitement for the future. Said Kim, “The healthcare system desperately needs improvement—and our team wants to get our hands dirty as soon as possible to help hospitals with these unforced errors.”

Veena Narashiman ’2020

In 2016, as Sarrah Nomanbhoy was starting her MBA at the Haas School of Business, the refugee crisis in Europe was in its second peak year and over a million applicants applied for asylum to the EU.
Nomanbhoy, a native Californian, had been watching the refugee crisis unfold since her undergraduate days at Stanford, where she studied international relations. She understood that the forces behind the crisis were bound to exacerbate the situation and the number of displaced people would only increase. She also began to understand that only 2 percent of refugees have access to voluntary repatriation, resettlement, or local housing solutions; the rest face long-term encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys.

At UC Berkeley, Nomanbhoy learned from Law Professor Katerina Linos that many asylum seekers arriving in Europe lack adequate information about how to apply for asylum, particularly how to prepare for the arduous asylum interviews. This motivated her and fellow graduate students Jerry Philip (Haas MBA ’18) and Peter Wasserman (Haas MBA 18) to apply for a Hult Prize focused on the refugee crisis.

Their idea was to come up with a digital means to inform asylum seekers about what to expect at asylum interviews and to convey a variety of legal rights, including the option to review interview transcripts and replace a translator. According to Nomanbhoy, about 70 percent of asylum seekers receive negative decisions after this first set of interviews, and many are in limbo pending the outcome of the appeal process.

With support from various Berkeley grants, the team traveled to Greece during the summer of 2017 to research the project. They saw firsthand that refugees often seek asylum alone, without much legal advice. Although legal aid organizations were on the ground, they witnessed there were not enough resources to accommodate the many asylum cases. As a result, the refugees often went into the life-defining interview process blind, reducing the chances for a favorable outcome.

When the three students returned to campus, they began to develop a chatbot, called MarHub (a reference to the Arabic greeting marhaba), which would allow refugees to receive personalized information regarding their specific path to asylum. Among the team’s insights is that a vast majority of Syrian migrants in Europe and the Middle East own smartphones and thus can be serviced remotely, without a large team on the ground.

Said Nomanbhoy: “The gaps in legal assistance are widely acknowledged, but it’s just a very difficult problem to tackle. When refugees seek asylum, there isn’t enough legal aid to go around. The procedures are constantly changing, and it is difficult for organizations to disseminate new information. We just make that information more accessible.”

By the fall of 2017, the MarHub team knew they had a strong idea, but they were struggling with their implementation strategy. They turned to the Blum Center’s Big Ideas student innovation contest for mentorship and support.

“Big Ideas forced us to flesh out the logistics of our pilot,” said Nomanbhoy. “We discovered some small pitfalls in our initial strategy, and thankfully we were able to proactively address them.”

Katy Digovich, who works for the Clinton Health Access Initiative and served as MarHub’s Big Ideas mentor, proved especially beneficial, as she has expertise in implementing technology solutions in resource constrained environments.

“Katy helped us think about building strong partnerships and managing the expectations of our key stakeholders,” said Nomanbhoy. “There are so many people affected by this refugee crisis. We realized the dangers of wanting to go too big too quickly.”

Feedback from the judges in the first and second rounds of the competition helped Nomanbhoy and her colleagues refine their purpose and think carefully about their approach. Utilizing feedback from the judges in the first and second rounds of the competition allowed the team to refine their purpose and helped them win third place in the Connected Communities category in May 2018.

The Marhub team is now preparing to launch a limited pilot in Lebanon early next year. Refugees there will be able to access MarHub on Facebook messenger and receive updated information instantaneously. After refugees answer a few questions, for example, the MarHub tool walks them through what to expect and how to present their case. The information comes directly from legal organizations devoted to the refugee crisis, protecting refugees from misinformation.

In the short term, Marhub’s chatbot will help people apply for refugee status and resettlement
and provide information about legal rights. In the long term, the team hopes to connect refugees with a wide range of services, including job placement, health services, and housing.

“The scale of the crisis is overwhelming, but we’re starting with a narrow focus,” said Nomanbhoy of her team’s approach. “We hope to expand our scope as we learn more about the needs of our stakeholders.”

The Lemelson Foundation, the world’s leading funder of invention in service of social and economic change, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies are embarking on a yearlong collaboration to enable students participating in the University of California Big Ideas Contest to increase their expertise in developing environmentally responsible inventions and innovations. The initiative exposes students to sustainable practices with the goal of increasing awareness around environmental impact throughout the invention and business model development process–from the materials used to the end of lifecycle implications.
The partnership between The Lemelson Foundation and the Blum Center will enhance the importance of environmental responsibility in the Big Ideas Contest, with special emphasis on the Hardware for Good category. Additionally, there will be an increased focus on engaging students from low-income and underserved backgrounds to participate in the contest.
Since 2006, the Blum Center has hosted the Big Ideas student innovation prize, to provide mentorship, training, and resources for budding social entrepreneurs across the University of California system. Hardware for Good encompasses everything from wearable and assistive technologies and devices to improve agricultural productivity to smart home systems that improve energy efficiency and safety. The 2017-2018 winner in the Hardware for Good category was Innovis Medical, a blood clotting prevention device for civilian and military trauma care that is being tested on cardiac patients at UC Davis Medical with the aim of FDA approval by 2021.
Said Phillip Denny, director of Big Ideas: “Since 2006, over 6,000 students from more than 100 majors have participated in the Big Ideas Contest, raising more than $2.4 million in seed funding that has been invested across 450 ventures. In this age of climate change and resource constraints, we need more students focused on planet-saving big ideas. We are thus immensely grateful to The Lemelson Foundation for making environmental responsibility an explicit element of the competition and for strengthening our outreach to low-income and first-generation college students. Diversity in innovators leads to diversity of innovations.”
With support from The Lemelson Foundation, Big Ideas 2018-2019 activities will include educational programs coupled with outreach to keep environmental responsibility top-of-mind as student inventors and innovators design new devices and ventures. Judging criteria will also be modified to reflect greater emphasis on environmental impact. Among the student education programs will be the “Inventing Green” workshop on October 22 to raise awareness and understanding of environmental responsibility in innovation and entrepreneurship among the University of California’s 240,000 undergraduate and graduate students and participating students from Makerere University in Uganda and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Lemelson Foundation funding will also support Blum Center practitioners-in-residence who will provide environmentally responsible design expertise to Big Ideas student teams and their projects.
“Students have the passion and drive to make the world better through inventions and entrepreneurship, and the Big Ideas program will better prepare them to ensure the solutions of today don’t become the problems of tomorrow,” said Cindy Cooper, program officer for The Lemelson Foundation. “Thinking holistically about environmental impact early on can also lead to more creative product ideas and put startups on a path to being more competitive and resilient as they grow to scale. We’re excited to see what students come up with.”

By Lisa Bauer

Globally, 1.5 billion people depend on small farms, which produce roughly 80 percent of the developing world’s food. Yet smallholder farmers remain some of the world’s most impoverished and food insecure people.

Aukrit Unahalekhaka, a co-founder of Ricult, a 2017 Big Ideas winner, knew this implicitly. He had grown up in a family of farmers in rural Thailand, and had witnessed firsthand his community’s struggles with the land. As a graduate student at MIT, he decided to put his education toward a critical piece of the global hunger challenge: financial inclusion for smallholder farmers.

Together with fellow MIT graduate student Usman Javaid, a native of Pakistan, Unahalekhaka has spent the last three years building a digital platform for smallholder farmers to access credit. The founders have been motivated by the fact that farmers who own less than two hectares are economically stuck; they have no means to invest in their properties or agricultural improvements–and often rely on loan sharks who charge exorbitant interest rates, trapping generations of farmers in cycles of debt and poverty.

Unahalekhaka and Javaid also have understood that access to credit is not the only problem for smallholder farmers. Credit is intertwined with other challenges, such as transportation logistics and precise weather forecasting. They thus designed Ricult to offer an integrated digital platform across the entire value chain, tracking end-to-end data and leveraging learnings to boost agricultural productivity and efficiency for all stakeholders, from farmers to input suppliers and buyers. Ricult is an apt name for their innovation. It underscores the importance of the middle of the agricultural value chain (“ricult” are the middle six letters of the word “agriculture”).

Since March 2017, the agtech startup has been working in Thailand and Pakistan, with plans to expand to neighboring countries. It also recently raised $1.85 million in seed funding, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the lead investor. Further, Ricult is collaborating with the Telenor Group’s telecommunications company, DTAC, to expand across Thailand, and has caught the attention of seed investors such as 500 Startups.

Ricult is now taking off, but in the early years developing ideas for an effective platform was a challenge. Another challenge was finding funders. The team spent several years applying to student innovation contests, receiving awards from MIT Ideas and the DOW Sustainability Challenge. The founders turned twice to UC Berkeley’s Big Ideas Contest, to take advantage of its eight months of product development, advising, and mentorship. In 2016, Ricult won third place in the Food Systems category. In 2017, the Ricult team earned second place in the 2017 Scaling Up category.

“The exercise of writing a thorough business plan for the Big Ideas competition proved invaluable,” said Unahalekhaka. “It ensured that everyone on our team was on the same page and helped us think through the key points of running a business. We Skyped with Big Ideas staff and mentors several times and received prompt, detailed feedback that helped us strengthen our business.”

One early idea for the Ricult platform was to harness machine learning and predictive analytics for farmers, input suppliers, food processing companies, and banks alike. To do so, the Ricult team developed local and national partners along the agricultural value chain in Pakistan and Thailand. Services to farmers include: access to agricultural inputs, such as improved seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides that are synchronized with crop cycles and priced at least 30 percent below the market rate; and advanced agronomic analytics and insights, such as soil testing, optimal crop rotation, and microclimate weather analytics. By cutting out unnecessary middlemen and decreasing crop spoilage, Ricult is aiming to transfer cost savings to farmers and increase their profitability.

As important, farmers that work with Ricult are gaining access to formal credit and affordable loans at interest rates at least five times below market rate. Ricult links farmers directly with buyers and guarantees payment within 48 hours, a significant departure from the traditional 60- to 90-day turnaround. Timely compensation allows farmers sufficient time and capital to prepare for the next planting season without being trapped in debt to middlemen.

The model, driven by data analytics technology, has increased farmer productivity by 50 percent, according to Ricult reporting. The company also is selling its land data to banks, said Unahalekhaka: “It functions as a form of collateral, so that farmers can finally access formal loans. Basically, we are solving two problems in one.”

Ricult is one of a growing number of social enterprises in developing countries reaping the benefits of technology. While computational advancements have numerous applications for sustainable development, leveraging machine learning to boost agricultural productivity is among the most promising. Investments in agriculture are widely viewed as the greatest weapon against global hunger and poverty; and growth in the agriculture sector has proven to be two to four times more effective in raising income among the poorest compared to other sectors.

“We are a double bottom line company,” said Unahalekhaka. “We want to prove that you can operate a sustainable business, while also contributing to the social good. This model is rare in Southeast Asia, but it’s proven an attractive idea to Thai investors who are keen to give back to the rural communities they grew up in.”