Author: Phillip Denny

Announcing the 2016 Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day Finalists!

The Blum Center for Developing Economies is excited to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Big Ideas Contest!

BCAPI_Pitch Daycaption 4The Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas Contest offers students an opportunity to turn their ideas into action. This year saw the largest number of applications in the contest’s history with over 750 graduate and undergraduate students from across 16 schools submitted 266 proposals. On April 27, top teams will pitch their innovative projects to a panel of esteemed judges representing the US Agency for International Development, the Autodesk Foundation, and several Big Ideas winners from the past decade, for an opportunity to receive additional seed funding for their ideas.

Participating in the Big Ideas contest provides students with support and mentorship for developing their ideas. Since its launch in 2006, Big Ideas has received over 1,400 proposals, supported more than 5,000 students from 18 universities, and provided seed funding for participants that have gone on to secure over $80 million in additional funding. The Big Ideas contest is made possible through the generous support of the Rudd Family Foundation, as well as prize sponsors including UCOP’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative, the U.S. Global Development Lab, the All Children Reading Grand Challenge, the Global Center for Food System Innovations, the Center for Information Technology in the Interests of Society, the Berkeley Food Institute, and the Associated Students of the University of California.

Big Vote_ImageCaptionAmong the students competing this year’s Grand Prize Pitch Day is Skylar Economy, a senior at UC Berkeley’s Department of Film & Media. Economy is the team lead of From Incarceration to Education Film and Resource Connection, which aims to produce a documentary film as well as provide resources to combat recidivism among formerly incarcerated people.

Economy says,”When we were in the very beginning stages of talking about producing a larger-scale documentary project about formerly incarcerated students, this goal seemed far-fetched and frankly unattainable as a student. Applying to Big Ideas was quite possibly the best choice we could have made in order to make this project a reality. We have grown so much through goal-setting, proposal writing, mentorship, and guidance. I’m so thankful to have been selected as a finalist and first place project in the Art & Social Change category, because I now know that we really can have a positive impact on people’s lives—and on the world around us.”

Economy’s project represents just one of the diverse topics that will be covered in the fifth annual Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day. Teams are tackling issues as wide-ranging as addressing mental health issues on the Berkeley campus, developing a carbon-negative soil conditioner for East African farmers, and creating an open-source, affordable genetic test for HIV in Mexico.

The Grand Prize Pitch Day, which is open to the campus community and the public, will be held on April 27, 5:00 pm-8:00 pm, in B100 Blum Hall. (RSVP requested). At this exciting event, contestants will deliver three-minute pitches followed by a question and answer session with the judges and the audience. While the judges deliberate, attendees will be able to network with students and prominent leaders from various Bay Area industries. Audience members will also have the opportunity to learn about all the ideas in this year’s contest and vote for their favorites through the “Big Vote” feature of the event. Food and drinks will be served during the evening, and the Grand Prize winners will be announced at 8:00 pm. Please join us at this inspiring event to cheer on your favorite Big Idea and celebrate the accomplishments of all the finalists!

On May 4, Big Ideas will be holding its annual Awards Celebration, open to the public, from 5-8pm in B100 Blum Hall. This event brings together the entire Big Ideas community to mark the conclusion of the 2015-2016 contest. This year represents the 10th Anniversary of the Big Ideas Contest and will include a demo session with past winners, a poster session featuring the this year’s award winning projects and plenty of opportunities for attendees to network and learn. RSVP requested

2016 Pitch Day Contestants:
Campus and Community Impact Pitch Round
FITE Film (From Incarceration to Education) and Resource Connection (UC Berkeley) – This project is focused on the production of a documentary film that will combat recidivism in the prison system by motivating currently incarcerated individuals to seek higher education and mentorship opportunities. The creation of a structured resource connection will provide assistance to  incarcerated individuals seeking to attain higher education.
LiftEd (UC Berkeley) – LiftEd is an iPad application that enables special education professionals to measure students’ academic & behavioral performance on individualized learning goals, analyze learning trends to modify instruction and intervention methods real-time, and ultimately share student progress with districts & parents on-demand.
SafeSpace (UC Berkeley) – Poor mental health is a widespread issue plaguing college students across the country. SafeSpace is a website and mobile application for UC Berkeley undergraduates to comfortably share their similar mental health issues; it is an anonymous, peer-led chat.
Global Impact Pitch Round
Dost: A Mobile Platform to Promote Parent Engagement (UC Berkeley) – Dost, or “Friend” in multiple languages, is a mobile platform that helps low-income parents in developing countries engage in their child’s education from day one. Dost is unique because it delivers action-oriented content to functionally illiterate moms through the technology already in their hands.
Open Viral Load (UC San Diego) – The Open Viral Load project aims to develop an open-source, affordable genetic assay test for HIV that can be easily modified to test other pathogenic diseases, such as tuberculosis and the Zika virus.  This project will allow low resource communities to receive the regular testing they need in order to know the status of their viral disease or to quickly diagnose patients with other pathogenic illnesses.

Safi Organics (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) – Safi Organics provides a carbon-negative soil conditioner for rural farmers who suffer from long-term crop loss due to soil degradation. Their product, Safi Sarvi, provides the essential nutrients and a biochar-based stabilizer that leads to a 30% increase in crop yield and 50% increase in income.

For additional information:
(510) 666-9120
bigideas@berkeley.edu

Countdown to Big Ideas Deadline

Time is ticking for University of California students to submit their world-changing concepts to Big Ideas@Berkeley, one of the nation’s oldest and most international student innovation competitions.

Blum Center News

banner[2] copyTime is ticking for University of California students to submit their world-changing concepts to Big Ideas@Berkeley, one of the nation’s oldest and most international student innovation competitions.

Three page pre-proposals for the competition, which awards up to $300,000 in prizes, are due November 12 at 12pm PST. Contest categories include Art & Social Change, Energy & Resource Alternatives, Financial Inclusion, Food Systems, Global Health, Improving Student Life, Information Technology for Society, and Mobiles for Reading. Winners are announced in May after a two-month mentorship period and a March 9 full proposal deadline.

Big Ideas’ mission is not only to identify and award promising student innovations, but also to support multidisciplinary teams through a multi-stage, yearlong process. Expanded advising drop-in hours and remote appointments are available with Big Ideas advisors through November 12, from 9 am to 4 pm, in order to help students with their pre-proposals.

Somo Project_300v2 copyFor many student innovators, Big Ideas has served as the first step in turning a grand hunch into a viable proposal. Last year, Amelia Phillips and her Big Ideas team won the first place award in the Conflict & Development category for the Somo Project — a socially focused, non-profit venture capital investment firm that works to identify, train, fund and mentor entrepreneurs looking to drive social change. Phillips credits the process of competing in Big Ideas and the resources available to students as critical elements in getting her project off the ground. “More important than just funding, Big Ideas@Berkeley opened up a community that has been and continues to be vital to growing The Somo Project,” says Phillips. “Through advising from the Big Ideas team, I have improved the way in which I describe what we do and how we plan to develop and grow the organization’s impact.”

Since 2006, the contest has provided support to student teams who have gone on to secure over $55 million in additional funding for their for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid ventures. Innovations and enterprises seeded by Big Ideas include: Cellscope, which turns the camera of a mobile phone or tablet computer into a high-quality light microscope; the Cal Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty now pushing to achieve carbon neutrality on campus by 2025; Captricity, which sells data capture software to digitize hand-written forms; and Back to the Roots, which creates sustainable food products from coffee grounds and other food waste.

The Big Ideas contest is made possible through the generous support of its contest sponsor the Rudd Family Foundation, as well as category sponsors including UCOP’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative, the U.S. Global Development Lab, the All Children Reading Grand Challenge, the Global Center for Food System Innovations, the Center for Information Technology in the Interests of Society, the Berkeley Food Institute, and the Associated Students of the University of California.

“This contest is multidisciplinary and high touch,” said Phillip Denny, manager of the Big Ideas Contest. “It challenges students to step outside of their traditional university-based academic work, take a risk, and use their education, passion, and skills to work on problems important to them.”

For more information on the Big Ideas contest:
Website: bigideascontest.org
Email: bigideas [at] berkeley [dot] edu

Big Ideas Winners Aim to Digitally Track Vaccinations in Rural India

Despite India’s robust government immunization program—which provides 11 different vaccinations free of cost—immunization rates remain low, particularly among poor populations.

 By Sybil Lewis

Emmunify Pic 1_CaptionDespite India’s robust government immunization program—which provides 11 different vaccinations free of cost—immunization rates remain low, particularly among poor populations. According to a 2015 University of Michigan study, only 57 percent of children younger than three in India are fully vaccinated. A nationwide survey conducted by UNICEF in 2009 found that many children are not fully immunized because their mothers and caretakers did not understand the vaccines, did not know where to get them, did not feel they were needed, or found vaccines shortages at health clinics.

With this in mind, three UC Berkeley MBA students— Anandamoy Sen, Erik Krogh-Jespersen, and Sanat Kamal Bahl—and Julia Walsh, a Cal professor of maternal and child health and international health, began in 2012 to rethink potential solutions. The team decided that the Indian vaccine deficit was due not to lack of supply, but to an information problem—and could best be addressed through a cellular vaccination tracking technology, which they called Emmunify.

Emmunify Pic 2b_Caption“When we looked at household surveys in Uttar Pradesh that asked why children were not getting vaccinated, we found the major problems were the families didn’t know the importance of them, didn’t know when they were supposed to go, and when they did go there were tremendously long wait times and possibly no vaccines,” said Professor Walsh, co-founder of Emmunify. “So when a mother does a mental cost-benefit analysis of waiting to get the vaccination or working for a day, she does not see the benefit of the vaccine.”

Another challenge to universal immunization is the paper record keeping system in India; records are often easily misplaced, resulting in missed or duplicated vaccinations. The most recent National Family Health Survey in India found that only 38 percent of mothers were able to show their child’s vaccination card.

To address these challenges, Emmunify plans to provide a portable electronic medical record that digitizes and stores immunization records, replacing cumbersome paper records. It also plans to send SMS reminders to families about when their next vaccinations are due and where they are available.

Emmunify got its start through the UC Berkeley’s 2012 Hacking Health competition, which awarded Sen, Krogh-Jespersen, and Bahl the grand prize of $2,000 to build a prototype. With Walsh as their faculty adviser, the team then won first place in the 2013 Big Ideas@Berkeley competition in the maternal and child health category and used the $8,000 award money to send two team members to the New Delhi slums in July 2013 to test Emmunify’s usability and feasibility. By partnering with Aarushi Charitable Trust, an organization of community health workers in the New Delhi slums, Emmunify was able to conduct stakeholder interviews with health workers and focus groups with mothers.

Emmunify Pic 3_CaptionThe Emmunify team aims to implement a multi-step process. First, a village health worker would use a portable, battery-powered tablet with Emmunify’s software to register a family’s health information and assign each family an ID number, which is programmed onto a portable chip (RFID tag) placed on the family’s phone. Once the family is registered, it will receive SMS or voicemail reminders about upcoming child vaccinations. When the family arrives at the clinic, its RFID tag will be scanned to confirm and update immunization records, preventing duplication. The final step is to store the health information from the tablet onto the Cloud, where an application will generate and send future automated messages.

Anandamoy Sen, Emmunify’s co-founder and mobile technology professional, said the organization’s main innovation is its adaptability to India’s rural health context. He noted there have been other prototypes of electronic record vaccination systems, but they require a Wi-Fi connection, which is scarce in rural villages, and use bulkier hardware that is easily damaged. What sets Emmunify apart, he said, is its offline design. An Internet connection is used only to send information to the Cloud; during the registration and vaccination process, no Internet, phone service, or electricity is required.

Much of what Emmunify aims to do is enabled by India’s robust mobile phone market. According to a 2010 UN report, for every 100 people there are approximately 45 cell phones. Emmunify can rely on SMS reminders because the RFID tag placed on families’ phones is designed to operate on any type of mobile.

Emmunify may be attractive to health care providers due to its simplicity and cost effectiveness.

“Paper [vaccination] cards are estimated to cost about a US$1.25 per child, whereas the tag is inexpensive, costing US$0.25-0.50 each,” said Professor Walsh. “We also can buy consoles and tablets for the health workers at less than US$100 each.”

Walsh noted that developing the necessary software and cloud analytics is the most challenging and costly aspect of Emmunify’s technology. The software—the tablet-chip interface, the tablet-cloud interface and cloud analytics, and the automated family reminders—will be interconnected. To date, the team has completed the RFID tag and has progressed with the user-interface for the health workers console. But they are still working on the Cloud-console software and analytics.

The potential impact of a technology like Emmunify extends beyond the health benefits of vaccinations. “If you are fully vaccinated, you will be better nourished, do better in school, stay in school longer, and have the chance to get out of poverty,” Walsh said. “We estimate that in places like the New Delhi slums and the poor populations of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, if you vaccinate an additional hundred kids, you save two lives.”

In the long run, Sen said health information stored in the Cloud could help health clinics forecast supply and demand for vaccinations, preventing shortages that have deterred mothers from getting their children vaccinated.

The Emmunify team has always known that cooperation with and buy-in from the Indian government is essential. The government plays a large role in the administration of vaccinations through its Universal Immunization Programme, which since 1978 has provided vaccinations of preventable, yet life-threatening, conditions to children free of charge.

In October 2010, the Indian government implemented a voluntary Universal ID program (UID), which stores citizens’ biometric data and assigns them a unique identity number, with the goal of improving and reducing corruption in the distribution of public services. Emmunify does not plan to integrate with the UID program because, said Sen, many rural clinics do not have the scanning technology to obtain biometric UID data and the UID program does not include the vaccination reminder software. However, Emmunify may use the national ID as a verification method for families’ RFID tags.

Next steps for Emmunify include registering as a nonprofit and pilot testing. Emmunify recently won third place in the 2015 BigIdeas @ Berkeley Scaling Up competition, receiving a $5,000 award that will help the team test all of Emmunify’s technology—from the chip to the SMS reminders—with families in the New Delhi slums in early 2016.

Emmunify’s technology may not be limited to India. Walsh said Emmunify is working closely with DHIS 2, an open source information system functional in 30 countries, including eight Indian states. Once the pilot test is complete, Emmunify plans to adapt its software to be compatible with DHIS, allowing for the possibility of expansion into other countries.

Calling All Changemakers: Big Ideas Turns 10

When the Big Ideas student innovation contest launched 10 years ago, it was a novel concept: give teams of students with potential breakthrough ideas small sums of money and a variety of supports and see what happens. Over the past decade, a lot has happened.

News-Sidebar-image_CategoriesWhen the Big Ideas student innovation contest launched 10 years ago, it was a novel concept: give teams of students with potential breakthrough ideas small sums of money and a variety of supports and see what happens. Over the past decade, a lot has happened.

Big Ideas has gone on to seed scores of high impact projects—from the Cellscope, which turns the camera of a mobile phone or tablet computer into a high-quality light microscope, to the Cal Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty now pushing to achieve carbon neutrality on campus by 2025. The contest has jump-started successful companies like Captricity, which sells data capture software to digitize hand-written forms, and Back to the Roots, which creates sustainable food products from coffee grounds and other food waste. It has also given the first precious funds to nonprofits like We Care Solar, which provides solar-powered suitcases for use in maternity hospitals and clinics, and Acopio, a supply chain information platform for Latin American coffee farmers.

For many student innovators, Big Ideas served as the first step in turning a grand hunch into a viable proposal. Since 2006, the contest has provided support to student teams who have gone on to secure over $55 million in additional funding for their for profit, nonprofit, or hybrid ventures.

This year’s contest launches September 8. It will provide up to $300,000 in awards, and will build on a well-honed tradition of coaching teams through eight months of pre-proposals, mentorship, and final submissions. The tenth anniversary contest will also provide more competition categories to more students. Contestants will be able to submit their ideas to the newly introduced “Financial Inclusion” category and the newly extended “Energy & Resource Alternatives” category, sponsored by the University of California Carbon Neutrality Initiative.

Big Ideas is one of the biggest inter-campus efforts in the University of California and the nation. It brings together such entities as the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, the United States Agency for International Development, USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development, the UC Berkeley Food Institute, the UC Global Food Initiative, the UC Carbon Neutrality Initiative, Michigan State University’s Global Center for Food Systems Innovation, the Associated Students of the University of California, and the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative —as well as over 200 judges and 50 mentors.

As the contest enters its tenth year, its reach encompasses 18 universities, including the entire University of California system and the USAID Higher Education Solutions Network, as well as 650,000 students—making the Big Ideas Contest one of the largest student innovation competitions in the world.

“When I first got involved as Big Ideas judge in 2006, the contest was a campus-based competition open to 30,000 UC Berkeley students,” said Phillip Denny, who manages the contest on behalf of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. “Now the contest is open to a population equivalent to a medium-sized U.S. city. The results in terms of the creativity of ideas and social impact really show.”

The contest’s first information sessions will take place at 6:30 pm on September 9 and September 29 in Blum Hall, B100. A live webcast will be also be available on the Big Ideas website for students participating from other universities.

This year’s contest categories include:

From September to March, when the final proposals are due, teams have the opportunity to attend information sessions, idea generation and networking events, writing workshops, editing blitzes, and office hours with Big Ideas advisors in person and online. In addition, finalist teams will be matched with mentors with expertise relevant to their project from a range of social enterprises, academic institutions, nonprofits, and businesses.

Unlike many business competitions, Big Ideas is multidisciplinary — attracting engineers, science majors, public health majors, as well as MBA students — and is focused on supporting a variety of social ventures including for-profit enterprises, non-profit organizations and community-based initiatives. The contest challenges students to step outside of their traditional university-based academic work, take a risk, and use their education, passion, and skills to work on problems important to them.

For more information about rules, categories, resources, funding, and contact information, please visit the Big Ideas website at http://bigideascontest.org