Author: Phillip Denny

Amy Liu of Partners in Life

By Veena Narashiman

When Amy Liu was a master’s degree student in biology at UC San Diego, she met a recently immigrated Haitian refugee who desperately needed a doula. After four hours of waiting for a professional, Liu—who had volunteered as a doula for a year—assisted the delivery of the woman’s baby over a 35-hour period. Inspired to provide pregnant women with the support they need, she founded Junior Hearts and Hands in August 2017, to connect mothers with doulas in a time-sensitive manner. After receiving mentorship from the Big Ideas Contest, she became an Innovation Ambassador for both the 2018-2019 academic year and now the 2019-2020 one. Liu, founder and CEO of Partners in Life, chatted with Big Ideas about how the program has inspired her (and why you should apply).

How did you hear about Big Ideas and how do you think the Contest aids students in navigating the social impact space?
My startup was incubated in the Basement at UCSD, but I discovered that not much funding is catered toward graduate students or social venture ideas. The Basement is where I saw a Big Ideas flyer that called for students with a social impact vision. I think that a lot of ventures are intrinsically social ventures, but a lot of students don’t see how their creation can change the world. Big Ideas helps you flesh out the vision, and their network proves to you that social ventures can be successful. The mentors function as support and as role models.

Why did you choose to participate in the Innovation Ambassador program and what are your responsibilities?
I get to advertise and brag about Big Ideas to UCSD! Originally the competition was open only to UC Berkeley students, so many students at other UC schools are unaware of the opportunity. Not many students, especially undergraduates, think that they have the ability to change the world. The competition shed that mentality completely, because you’re never doing this alone. It’s such a confidence builder, which is why I think everyone should participate.

What is something you wish you knew about the Big Ideas Contest before you joined?
I didn’t realize competitors were offered mentors! It’s a huge plus point, and differentiates Big Ideas from typical venture contests. You’re not thrown into the deep end after some help with your business proposal—you’re constantly supported throughout the journey. Big Ideas doesn’t simply offer a first, second, and third place. A lot of people can be winners.

What are some of the characteristics of a successful Big Ideas participant?
There’s not a set blueprint (and the different tracks of the competition can allow for a lot of interdisciplinary game plans), but some of the more successful founders I’ve seen had an infectious passion for their idea—-and more importantly, the determination to see it through. You need to be able to seek our criticism and know what you don’t know.

How did Big Ideas help you navigate your journey as a budding innovator? Do you have any advice for students unsure if their idea is “worthy” of the Contest?
Honestly, go for it. You won’t know what might happen if you don’t float your idea to multiple people. You only need one person to nurture you, and you need to take the chance. Lead into the pivoting that comes with a small venture, and if you think your idea is decent, go for it.

Why should students apply to the Contest?
Ultimately, this is a stepping stone you need to make it out there. Big Ideas will help provide you the building blocks to any successful venture: the mentorship, resources, connections, and funding.

How Amelia Phillips Brought her Big Idea to Kenya

By Emily Denny

When Amelia Hopkins Phillips, executive director of SOMO, graduated from UC Berkeley in 2016, her plan was to move to Nairobi, Kenya for six months and then return home. Yet three and a half years later, she’s still there.

One of the catalysts for Phillips’ extended stay was the Big Ideas Contest. In 2015, she won first place for SOMO, which identifies, trains, funds, and mentors entrepreneurs looking to drive social change by building enterprises in their own low-income urban communities. Her idea–motivated by previous work with an educational nonprofits which, she said, “exposed her to a lot of unsustainability in the NGO culture in Nairobi ”–was to come up with an idea that could last.

Phillips was also influenced by what she saw at Cal. While majoring in International Studies, she said she constantly noticed the number of resources accessible to her friends and classmates who wanted to start their own businesses in the Bay Area. She questioned why these same resources weren’t accessible in the low-income communities of Kenya.

For that reason, Amelia and her co-founder, George Rzepecki, built Somo to provide training and tools to help low-income Nairobi entrepreneurs build businesses that could change their communities from within. SOMO, which is the root of a Swahili word meaning “lesson,” argues that “we all have lessons to learn from each other and by investing in the right people, we help break the cycle of poverty and help bring long-term stability to urban slum areas.”

Over the past five years, SOMO has grown from a proposal submitted to the Big Ideas Contest to a viable nonprofit, which receives close to 2,000 applications annually from entrepreneurs looking to launch their business ideas. Every year applicants who are accepted undergo a 12-week bootcamp, in which they learn business startup skills and receive funding for their business ideas. Last year 79 participants underwent these bootcamps, and this year there will be a least 170 participants looking to launch their business ideas. So far SOMO helped launch 58 businesses, partnering with them for two years through their acceleration program, that have served up to 140,000 customers and created 258 jobs.

“While Nairobi is a very entrepreneurial place, the lower-income communities are cut off from the resources to launch businesses,” said Phillips, “We at SOMO want to provide the resources that aren’t usually accessible in low-income, urban areas to entrepreneurs who want to start socially-focused business ideas.”

SOMO works within multiple communities in Nairobi and recently expanded to Kisumu in Western Kenya.

“A lot of people who we work with have been told their entire lives that their businesses can’t grow past a certain point,” Phillips said. “We give the hard skills they need to run a business, sure. But more than that, we provide confidence that allows them to grow as people and create lasting impact in their communities.”

When Hilda and Diana, a mother-daughter team, attended their first entrepreneur training class with SOMO, they wouldn’t speak up in class.

“The mother did not speak English and the daughter was only 19 years old and super shy,” said Phillips.

Since the training, not only have Hilda and Diana successfully launched the reusable diaper company, Hidaya Diapers in Korogocho, they also have pitched their business to large audiences and most recently were featured on a national TV station, on NTV Kenya.

“These are two women who would barely speak to me when I first met them. Now they are the two most confident women that I know,” said Phillips.

Phillips aims to help businesses become sustainable, adding “even if SOMO is no longer working with our entrepreneurs in a hands-on way, or even if SOMO closes down tomorrow, the supported businesses and the impact they are creating will last beyond us.” Currently all besides one of the businesses the organization has invested in have been cash-flow positive within 8 months of starting.

One such example of thriving business is Verics, a hydroponics enterprise that received training and funding from SOMO in 2016. Hydroponics is a farming method that doesn’t use soil, and can produce higher yields of crops, requiring less water and decreasing the chance for pollution to contaminate crops. Verics now has now set up 13 small farms across settlements in Nairobi.

Similarly, Hidaya Diapers is providing sustainable and higher income work by employing single mothers in low-income areas. The company aims to improve the health and hygiene of young children and decrease environmental impacts by eliminating waste.

All of SOMO’s 23 person (and growing) team, with the exception of Phillips and one other are Kenyan; and more than half of her team are from the areas SOMO works within. In addition, four of SOMO’s team members are past entrepreneurs who went through SOMO’s training program. “Having our entrepreneurs as team members is really important because they understand our program better than anyone,” said Philips. “We involve the community with everything we do. We are apart of it, not separated from it.”

Recently, SOMO expanded to Kisumu, and Phillips expects to keep expanding.

“Our plan is to expand to Mombasa, a city on Kenya’s eastern coast, and then the goal in the next few years is to go international with our program,” said Phillips, mentioning SOMO’s incipient partnerships with similar organizations in India and Mexico.

Providing Accessible Medical Care through Low-Cost Fracture Detection

By Emily Denny

Treating bone fractures in the developing world is increasingly difficult due to the lack of x-ray accessibility. Emily Huynh, a senior at UC Berkeley studying Bioengineering, thought: if bone fractures were diagnosed and treated properly in an affordable way, large populations of people could avoid the chronic pain, disability, and socioeconomic disadvantage that mistreated fractures cause. This past spring, Huynh and her team won third place in Big Ideas’ Hardware for Good category for a medical device that provides orthopedic care in underdeveloped countries and remote settings called Fractal.

Big Ideas spoke with Huynh to learn about the inspiration behind the idea, what she and her team are currently working on, and how Fractal can create a positive impact to communities in the developing world.

Q: How is Fractal a solution to the growing numbers of untreated and mistreated bone fractures in the developing world?
A: There is about one orthopedic surgeon for 700,000 people in Nigeria — that’s a long waiting room. Despite the fact that the number of mistreated fractures is growing in developing countries, the number of professionals trained to treat these fractures isn’t growing with it. If bone fractures are not treated properly issues like bone-shortening, chronic pain, infection, and in an extreme case amputation can occur.

Fractal allows a clinician — one who may not have five years of training in orthopedic residency, but are familiar with the medical environment to triage patients — to rapidly diagnose and treat patient’s fractures properly, and accelerate recovery. By providing developing countries with an inexpensive, accurate tool for diagnosing and monitoring of bone fractures, we will facilitate better orthopedic care and reduce the incidence of mistreatments, misdiagnoses, and the ensuing complications.

Q: How is Fractal’s technology different than traditional technologies used to diagnose bone fractures?
A: The most common technology is x-ray, but abroad this can be inaccessible because x-ray is expensive to buy and maintain. A common alternative to x-ray is portable ultrasound which is relatively cheap, but it is hard to read, especially for fractures. Fractal fills this gap: it’s inexpensive like ultrasound, but is quantifiable and easy to use.

Fractal leverages and automates existing solutions in order to detect bone fractures without the use of imaging. We are basing the technology off of a technique physicians used before x-ray and ultrasound was invented called auscultatory percussion. It’s the same idea as when a doctor places a stethoscope on your back and asks you to breathe in. We are applying that same kind of “apply an impulse and listen to what you hear” methodology to the leg. By sending controlled audio waves through the bone, Fractal records and analyzes the sounds physicians listen for during bone auscultation, eliminating the chances of misdiagnosis that may occur without the proper equipment.

Q: How can you ensure Fractal is trusted in remote communities?
A: For patients in remote areas of many developing countries, going to urban care centers where people can be treated properly, can sometimes take days of walking. So, traditionally people living in these remote areas depend on bonesetters to treat a fracture. We do not want to upend or disagree with these trusted bonesetters, but to facilitate their care. If we are able to gain the trust of local caretakers, I think that Fractal could become a very helpful tool in treating larger populations of people.

Q: Through a partnership with The Lemelson Foundation, Fractal and other Big Ideas applicants in the Hardware for Good category participated in environmental responsibility workshops. How do you hope to implement sustainability into Fractal’s prototype?
A: Big Ideas’ Hardware for Good category was really interesting because sustainability is something innovators don’t really think about because we are so focused on how our product is going to work, how we are going to market it and how we are going to sell it.

The body of Fractal is printed with PLA (polylactic acid) which can be melted down and recycled. We are also hoping to create a service where if a device is broken it can be sent back to us. Once we receive the broken device we can repurpose it for the parts that don’t work. This will extend the device’s end of life, ultimately allowing us to limit our waste.

Q: How has your own academic interests led to the development of Fractal?
A: When I came to Berkeley I structured my coursework around learning how to build medical devices. I learned about hardware, how to build it, how to write the code so it can communicate, and how to do hands-on prototyping. Justin Krogue is my partner for Fractal. He is a fifth year orthopedic resident at UC San Francisco (UCSF) who rotates at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). When Krogue came to me with this idea, I ran with it. I thought Fractal tied my Bioengineering degree and skills together in a way that addressed social concerns.

Q: How have mentors and medical industry experts contributed to the development of Fractal?
A: Mentorship is one of the most important things that comes from Big Ideas. I was connected with Jeffrey Lu who won Big Ideas a few years ago. He made a big difference to my proposal because he is still in the start-up phase himself and provided significant insight from his experience to identify areas of improvement for both the proposal and the device itself. He helped me envision how to create a device that can be successful and I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor.

Dr. Nirmal Ravi from eHealth Africa has experienced how developing countries such as Nigeria, Tanzania, and India have an inadequate healthcare infrastructure due to a lack of personnel and high equipment and maintenance costs, making it difficult for all communities access appropriate care. He has helped us get a better understanding of how we should market to developing countries. A lot of people reach out to developing countries thinking they can’t help themselves. We wanted to ensure that we assimilate with these countries and work into their culture to try and help solve this problem.

Q: What is your vision for Fractal over the next few months and what do you look forward to the most as you continue with Fractal?
A: Right now we are trying to go to a couple conferences to gain exposure and see if anyone else in the academic community has opinions and advice on the Fractal. We also currently collecting data at UCSF and SFGH on more tibia and hip fractures and of course looking for funding. In the long term, we hope to partner with Muhimbili Orthopaedic Institute in Tanzania so we can send our devices to become a part of a global clinical trial.

As my team and I continue to take these next steps, I look forward to seeing how Fractal can help just one patient and enable them to live a normal life. I am excited to see how Fractal can positively impact a community.

Big Ideas Integrates Sustainability into Its Competition

By Emily Denny

“Sustainability is something innovators don’t really think about because we are so focused on how our product is going to work, how we are going to market it, and how we are going to sell it,” said Emily Huynh, a senior studying biomedical engineering at UC Berkeley.

Last spring, Huynh won third place in the Big Ideas Contest’s Hardware for Good category for Fractal, a medical device that provides low-income countries a tool to diagnose and monitor bone fractures. Huynh said that one of the challenges when building the Fractal prototype was how best to incorporate environmental concerns.

In 2018, Big Ideas responded to Huynh’s knowledge gap by introducing a pilot Environmental Responsibility Program into the contest. Supported by The Lemelson Foundation, the program offers a curriculum on sustainable design approaches.

In August, Big Ideas hired an environmental design fellow to support the program, Mimi Kaplan, who is a master’s student at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Kaplan recruited Jeremy Faludi, a Dartmouth College professor and expert in green design and engineering; and together, they have developed two Inventing Green workshops for Big Ideas contestants in the Hardware for Good category.

“Having studied sustainable development at Columbia University, I have relevant academic experience to support Jeremy in developing the workshop content in a way that was suited to the needs of the students,” said Kaplan. “After college, I worked with the Milken Innovation Center in Jerusalem, assisting and managing the logistics and coordination of conferences and workshops on agtech developments and water management in Israel and in California.”

Big Ideas teams in the Hardware for Good category attended the first environmental workshop in the fall semester and the second in the spring.

“The purpose of the first Inventing Green workshop was to introduce students to the concepts of environmental design and circular economy, which includes using locally sourced and environmentally responsible materials and making recyclable and modular products,” said Kaplan. “The purpose of the second workshop was to give students the tools to implement these concepts in their designs and training to help make them confident in doing so.”

Emily Huynh and her team at Fractal attended the Inventing Green workshops, and then restructured how their medical device was built. The Fractal team reported the workshops helped them understand that the production phase of a medical device has the highest impact on the environment. As a result, they decided to use PLA (polylactic acid), a plastic that can be melted down and recycled, to print the body of the medical device.

“Learning about the process of sustainable design led us to reconsider how our product is going to work, how are we going to market it and how are we going to sell it.” said Huynh. “We are also hoping to create a service in which, if a device is broken, it can be sent back to us. Once we receive the broken device, we can repurpose it for the parts that don’t work. This will extend the device’s end of life, ultimately allowing us to limit our waste,” said Huynh.

Similar to Fractal, team members from the Sonic Eyewear Project (SEP) also reported that the workshops helped them reconsider the production of their prototype. Darryl Diptee, founder of SEP, won second place in the Big Ideas’ Hardware for Good Category in 2019 for developing a technology that enables people who are blind or visually impaired to use echolocation to better navigate their surroundings.

“The sustainability workshops helped us introduce and infuse sustainable approaches into our product development,” said Diptee on the workshops. “As a result, we are implementing green sustainability into SEP by using renewable plastics. We are also working on a clip-on product that can be affixed to existing eyewear, eliminating the need to buy an additional pair.”

Kaplan noted student feedback on the challenges of integrating sustainable design into their inventions. “In a roundtable feedback session at the end of the contest year, multiple teams mentioned the difficulty of local sourcing, modularization, and ensuring circularity of their products if it meant justifying a higher up-front cost to investors,” she said. “The group discussed methods for overcoming this challenge, including how to pitch the long-term financial savings that sustainable design brings as well as the importance of environmental responsibility.”

Overall, Kaplan said the workshops increased contestants’ confidence in applying principles of sustainable design in their invention process, and that the workshops had an impact on participants’ perception of the design process cost, ease of manufacturing, marketability, and quality.

In the spring, Dr. Maria Artunduaga won Big Ideas’ first-place prize in the Hardware for Good category for Respira Labs, a startup for a medical device that tracks and monitors lung health, providing an early warning for COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) attacks.

“It’s our social responsibility as innovators to be mindful. The sustainability workshops helped us at Respira Labs realize that you can build a prototype while also being mindful of the environment.” said Dr. Artunduaga.

Already aware that healthcare sector accounts for nearly 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions and generates an average of 25 pounds of waste per patient each day, the Respira Labs team saw the workshops as an opportunity to reconsider how its prototype can incorporate sustainable design. Respira Labs intends to use reusable sensors as well as tie the use of smartphones to the COPD technology, eliminating the need for excess medical devices.

In addition to learning how to reduce waste during the production process, teams in the Environmental Responsibility Program also reported learning that sustainable design can reduce legal risk, final product cost, and increase innovator creativity and motivation.

“This year, we plan to again offer a workshop on environmental responsibility in product design for student teams creating physical products,” said Kaplan. “We also plan to take Big Ideas students to maker spaces in the Bay Area, and to share through lectures and conferences what we have learned in implementing the Big Ideas environmental responsibility curriculum with the support of The Lemelson Foundation.”