About Us

The Big Ideas @ Berkeley Initiative was officially launched in July, 2005. Its mission is to provide funding, support, and encouragement to interdisciplinary teams of UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students who have "big ideas."

Background

Our Vision

Ecosystem

Bios

Background

In the spring of 2005, Tom Kalil received the first unrestricted grant under the Omidyar Network Enzyme Program - created by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. The Omidyar Network has a broad mission -- to help "every individual discover their own power to make good things happen." Enzymes are individuals that the Omidyar Network has invited to invest a limited amount of capital in support for their mission. Enzymes make experimental grants with no strings attached to recipients of their choice. Stewart Brand (President of Long Now Foundation) made the first such "enzyme" investment to Tom Kalil, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology.

This funding was immediately and generously matched by the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS), and the venture capital firm Sevin Rosen.

In March 2006, Big Ideas and the student government (ASUC) unveiled a campus-wide competition (http://contest.berkeley.edu) that was designed to find and fund students with creative, high-impact ideas related to curricular innovation, green cities, neglected diseases, clean energy, information technology for society, social entrepreneurship, science and technology policy, serious games, beautifying Berkeley, and designing the next "X Prize" - a $10 million private prize that launched the first private race into space. Judging was done by research centers across campus.

The contest received 91 entries overall, and a total of $106,875 in cash prizes was allocated to 29 winners (including honorable mentions).

As a result of the contest, Big Ideas is now supporting over 40 student-led initiatives. We are also receiving many more high-quality proposals than we can support, and many of the projects that we are supporting require and deserve additional resources. Fortunately, Big Ideas received permission from the campus to create the Big Ideas marketplace.