Groundbreaking Innovations and Inspiring Innovators at Big Ideas Pitch Day

The 2020 Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day served as the capstone to the most competitive year in the history of the program. The 2019-2020 contest attracted a record number of innovators, with more than 400 projects and 1200 students.

On September 23, seven of the top teams from the Big Ideas Contest presented their final pitches for Grand Prize honors and an additional $10,000 in funding. Despite a myriad of challenges brought about by COVID-19, each participant successfully delivered inspiring four minute pitches from various locations around the world.

This important student-led, social innovation competition first launched at UC Berkeley in 2006. In the span of fifteen years, Big Ideas has invested $2.5 million in awards to 500 social impact projects, supporting over 8,000 students and 2,500 ventures.

“With each passing year, more and more students rise to the occasion and use their energy and talent to face dire challenges facing our planet,” said Big Ideas director Phillip Denny. “The projects we heard from today are just a fraction of the transformative social innovations developed through the Big Ideas program with potential to really make an impact.”

The FootMo Kit team tests their livestock disease diagnostic system.

Over the past year, the seven finalists worked with mentors to develop their projects into working, viable products. Finalists were chosen from hundreds of other projects, all tackling varied and complex global issues from global health, food insecurity, climate change, affordable housing and disaster relief.

Upon the conclusion of the seven pitches, the decision was left to an esteemed panel of judges including UC Berkeley Changemaker Initiative lecturer Alex Budak , Amelia Phillips of SOMO, Andrea French from the UC Office of the President, and Sony Innovation Fund’s Austin Noronha.

Taking home the 2019-2020 Grand Prize award was FootMo Kit, a point-of-care diagnostic for foot and mouth disease detection of livestock. Mushusha Richard and Athuaire Rabecca of Makerere University in Uganda led the winning pitch.

Their product is targeted towards the cattle industry in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the world’s fastest growing population at 2.6 percent per annum. Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to have 2.5 billion people by 2050. Not only is local agriculture pivotal in feeding the population in this region, but around 60 percent of Africa’s economic activity is based on livestock.

Foot and mouth Disease proves detrimental to the livestock sector and FootMo Kit aims to mitigate the problem through an accessible, highly accurate, cheap and portable diagnostic tool used to detect the disease in cattle.

The inspiration behind FootMo Kit was personal for Richard, who grew up in Southwestern Uganda in a cattle-dependent farming district. “There were so many times I was unable to raise even my school fees due to foot and mouth disease outbreaks that affected me and my community,” Richard said.

FootMo Kit’s groundbreaking technology is the only diagnostic tool with real-time testing capabilities and the highest sensitivity, which fights threats of cross contamination of the disease between cattle.

“It was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait,” Richard remarked. “I was sleepless that night when I remembered that this is the first time a Makerere University team won the Big Ideas Grand Prize. It was history made for myself, FootMo Kit and Makerere University.”

The FootMo Kit team plans to empower farmers all across Uganda and expand to East Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa within the next five years. With full force, they see FootMo Kit serving millions of farmers in Africa and raising the average income of farmers 4 dollars a day by 2025.

The FootMo Kit team conducting field interviews and field tests in Uganda.

“We’re very happy that our work has been acknowledged and that we are getting the necessary resources, support and ecosystem so that we can scale our product to market,” said Richard.

Professor Daniel Fletcher, Big Ideas Faculty Director noted,“It is clear all teams have a path to success and we are excited to see each move forward.”

Every pitch in this ambitious group amplified how passionate participants are in making real change. The 2019-2020 Big Ideas Contest ended on a strong note. It’s exciting to see what new ideas will come about next.

To learn more about all of the 2019-2020 Grand Prize finalists, please read the profiles below:

Sundial Foods: Presented by Jessica Schwabach, Sundial is a sustainable startup based in California that makes plant-based meats using only natural ingredients.

Pumzivent (formerly Automated Ambu Bag System): Pumzivent, pitched by Peter Kavuma, designs ventilatory devices to help battle acute respiratory distress in low-resource locations.

Biomilitus: CEO Trevor Fowles pitched black soldier fly larvae as a solution to create a high value animal feed product, which could combat the growing problem of organic waste.

FakeNet AI: CEO Raymond Lee presented a powerful algorithm that detects and blocks deepfake media to protect against the expanding problems of fraud, abuse and disinformation.

Heliovap: Casey Finnerty pitched a unique, low-impact and affordable desalination technology that supplies fresh drinking water to remote communities.

When You Were Young: Director Tracey Quezada delivered a heartfelt presentation on the problem of chid sex trafficking. Her team is working on a social impact multimedia campaign that touches on the lasting effects of child sexual abuse on communities of color.

About Big Ideas: Big Ideas is an early-stage innovation competition that provides funding, support and recognition to interdisciplinary teams of graduate and undergraduate students who have creative solutions to pressing social challenges.

The 2019-2020 Big Ideas program was made possible through the support and generosity of following sponsors: The Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation-Acumen Student Social Innovation Challenge, University of California Office of the President, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), the Lemelson Foundation, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies

For additional information:

Phillip Denny

pdenny@berkeley.edu

Seven “Big Ideas” to Change The World:
Grand Prize Pitch Day Previews

Social entrepreneurs envision a better world — one with accessible healthcare and education, clean water and medicine. They ask themselves difficult questions like: How can I make a more sustainable and equitable future?

Social entrepreneurs envision a better world — one with accessible healthcare and education, clean water and medicine. They imagine communities empowered by circular economies and they understand technology as a tool for social good. They ask themselves difficult questions like: How can I make a more sustainable and equitable future? — and from there, plan cohesive and multifaceted solutions to pressing social issues.

Each year since its founding in 2005, Big Ideas is inspired by the passion and drive of the student entrepreneurs who ask these same questions, motivated to innovate for a better world around them.

On September 23, from 12:00-2:00 pm PST, seven finalist teams, hailing from Makerere University, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley, will present their innovations to a panel of esteemed judges for the title of the Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Winner and a prize of $10,000. (RSVP HERE!)

These finalists asked and are now answering important questions:

How can I save more lives in low-resourced emergency hospitals?
How can I protect the future of media content from misinformation and injustice?
How can I create a more sustainable alternative meat industry?
How can I empower rural farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa?
How can I limit food waste and improve agricultural health?
How can I provide clean, drinking water to the communities most impacted by climate change?
How can I amplify voices of color in the public conversation on child sexual abuse?

“After seeing how student teams persevered during this incredibly challenging year, I am confident -–now more than ever–- that this generation of problem solvers and inventors possess the curiosity, compassion, and commitment for the multi-pronged attacks needed to make this world a better place for all,” said Phillip Denny, Big Ideas Director, on the unique challenges posed to this year’s finalists due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2019-2020 finalists have pursued complex social issues, rising to the top of 1,200 student innovators who submitted their visions to the Big Ideas Contest in the fall, all while enduring the chaos of 2020 and adapting their social innovations to uncertain and changing environments. Scroll down to learn more about each finalist team:

AUTOMATED AMBU BAG SYSTEM

Designing Medical Technology within a Country’s and Hosipital’s Limited Capital

In low-resource settings, medical support is limited and advanced respiratory support systems are rare. In Uganda, there are only 55 ICU beds to support the country’s population of nearly 42 million. Motivated to find a medical solution to an issue that plagues low-resource hospitals, Peter Kavuma and his team of biomedical engineers developed a low-cost, easy-to-maintain ventilatory device called the Automated Ambu Bag System.

BIOMILITUS

Understanding Insects as an Underutilized Tool for Sustainable Food Systems

In 2019, a team of UC Davis researchers and students, including PhD student Ferisca Putri, discovered an underutilized tool that could solve the growing threat to human food systems: insects. Putri and her team launched BioMilitus, a sustainable business that harvests black soldier fly larvae with food byproducts, and as a result creates a sustainable animal feed, a product that traditionally relies on unsustainable ingredients like soybean, corn, and fishmeal.

FAKENET AI

Blocking Manipulated Media Content Through Advanced Detection Algorithms

The first time Raymond Lee, a 2019 graduate of UC Berkeley’s Master of Information and Data Science, saw a Deepfake, a video in which a person in an existing video is replaced with someone else’s likeness, he was surprised at how real it seemed. Concerned about the injustice that could result from manipulated news media and social media content, Lee and his team launched FakeNet AI, a Deepfake detection technology.

FOOTMO KIT

Empowering Rural Farmers through Disease Detection Technology

When Richard Mushusha, a master’s student at Makerere University in Uganda, conducted a series of interviews with rural farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, he discovered a common demand: livestock farmers need a low-cost device that can track major animal disease outbreaks. Inspired to design a portable tool used by farmers to detect Foot and Mouth Disease in their cattle, Mushusha and his team launched FootMo Kit.

HELIOVAP

Tapping into the Ocean: Supplying Drinking Water to Remote Island Communities

Increasing pollution and growing populations limit water access for communities around the world. Disproportionately affected are remote island populations, often left without reliable water sources as irregular weather patterns become a reality. This is why Kelly Conway and her team committed themselves to developing a flexible, off-grid desalination technology that can allow people to tap into abundant water sources, like the oceans.

SUNDIAL FOODS

Transforming Science into Protein: Two UC Berkeley Students’ Mission to Revolutionize the Alternative Meat Industry

In 2019, Jessica Schwabach, a UC Berkeley undergraduate and Siwen Deng, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley’s PhD program in Plant and Microbial Biology, met in an Engineering Challenge Lab on alternative meats. After the class was over, they put their science backgrounds together and co-founded Sundial Foods, a sustainable business that approaches plant-based meat creation from a new angle.

WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

Challenging Stigma and Silence: How “When You Were Young” Empowers Voices of Color

When Tracey Quezada learned her own family member had been sexually assaulted by a family member, she was surprised by how little mainstream media covered child sexual abuse (CSA) for communities of color. She became motivated to address the ongoing trauma CSA has on families, communities and society as a whole, sparking her interest to direct the documentary film “When You Were Young”.

LiquidGoldConcept Wins Big Ideas 2020 Scaling Up Contest

When UC Berkeley alumna Anna Sadovnikova launched her successful social enterprise devoted to helping pregnant mothers overcome the challenges of breastfeeding, she never expected that she would need to reinvent the entire program — transforming an in-person breastfeeding simulator into a virtual training program.

But that’s what she and her team did this spring.

LiquidGoldConcept CEO, Anna Sadovnikova pitches at the UC Davis Big Bang! Event in May 2019 (Photo credit: José Luis Villegas/UC Davis)

Sadovnikova, who is pursuing a MD/PhD at UC Davis, realized that COVID-19 meant that “breastfeeding mothers were not going to have access to their usual in-person support.” In order to continue breastfeeding support while avoiding additional clinic and ER visits, a virtual platform for breastfeeding education was imperative for both mothers’ and newborns’ health.

For their novel innovation and successful pivot from the challenges posed by COVID-19, Sadovnikova and the LiquidGoldConcept team are taking home the Grand Prize Pitch award for the Big Ideas Scaling Up Contest, an annual contest that provides former winners of Big Ideas the opportunity to compete for additional funding of $25,000.

LiquidGoldConcept first won the Big Ideas Contest in 2016 for their Breast Massage Knowledge Bank, a platform that provides evidence-based, tailored breast massage videos in order to educate parents and health providers, and eventually grew into an in-person, simulation-based training program for healthcare professionals and trainees in clinical lactation.

In response to COVID-19, their pivot took place while Sadovnikova and her colleagues were finalizing their submission to the Big Ideas Scaling Up Contest. They shelved their in-person breastfeeding simulation operation and instead launched the Lactation QBank, an online training program for healthcare providers to build clinical decision-making and technical and counseling skills relevant to lactation support.

Sadovnikova presented the Lactation QBank on June 23 at the Big Ideas Contest Scaling Up Grand Prize pitch event before a virtual audience and panel of judges from the Rockefeller Foundation, +Acumen, and University of California Office of the President.

This year, four finalist teams (see sidebox) hailed from three universities, focusing on gender equity, sustainable food production, education for refugees in underserved communities, accessible medical care, and spanning from communities across North America, Africa, and Asia.

Big Ideas Director Phillip Denny said that although all four teams received high praise, the judges were particularly impressed by LiquidGoldConcept’s ability to transition rapidly to the changing environment.

Winning the Scaling Up award was a “surreal experience,” said Sadovnikova, “and the culmination of many years of persistence and hard work.” With the Big Ideas funding, LiquidGoldConcept will continue to develop and market its virtual platform to meet demand.

Shortly after winning the Scaling Up Contest, LiquidGoldConcept got more good news. They received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Award from the federal government to develop a high fidelity newborn simulator. They also have secured letters of intent from various lactation training providers from across the country and received commitments from angel investors for seed funding.

“The recognition by the Scaling Up judges was exactly what the LiquidGoldConcept team needed,” said Sadovnikova. “It was a vote of confidence in our ability to improve breastfeeding outcomes through healthcare professional education and build a great business with a large social impact.”

To learn more about LiquidGoldConcept, visit their website https://liquidgoldconcept.com/ and read about their newly launched virtual training program here: https://lactationqbank.com/

Big Ideas “Scaling Up” Pitch Contest (June 23)

On June 23, the Big Ideas Contest will host its inaugural Scaling Up Grand Prize Pitch competition via Zoom 1:00-2:30 PM PST, featuring four remarkable teams competing for the $25,000 top prize.

On June 23, the Big Ideas Contest will host its inaugural Scaling Up Grand Prize Pitch competition via Zoom 1:00-2:30 PM PST, featuring four remarkable teams competing for the $25,000 top prize (RSVP here). The Scaling Up category of Big Ideas was launched in 2011 to help Big Ideas alumni navigate a common challenge for social startups: the “Pioneer Gap.”

In Closing the Pioneer Gap, the Acumen Foundation noted that “(t)he Pioneer Gap is one of the biggest hurdles social ventures must cross before they can reach any sort of scale. In very early stages, a social enterprise often relies on grants and the entrepreneur’s personal savings to test out its ideas. At later stages, once the business model has been proven and it is clear that the enterprise can scale its business, it can more easily attract commercial capital. However, there is a huge gap in financial support between these very early stages and later stages that prevents many social enterprises from succeeding.”

Most social start-ups stall in their pioneer phase. While the exact failure rate is debated, the number of start-ups that survive the pioneer gap is between 5% and 30%. Fewer than 0.5% reach serious scale.

“Closing the Pioneer Gap Effectively,” Michiel Elich and Lisa Jordan (2019)

The four Big Ideas alumni teams selected to participate in the Scaling Up Pitch competition hail from three universities. Their innovations tackle sustainable food production, refugee support, gender equity, and accessible medical care — and their efforts span from North American, Asia, and Africa. What they have in common, however, is a shared success in surpassing barriers often associated with launching early-stage social ventures, and in turn, creating positive, lasting innovations.

Acarí turns the invasive devil fish into delicious, sustainable jerky

Mike Mitchell and Sam Bordia (2018 Big Ideas winners) founded Acarí, a business that transforms the invasive devil fish in Mexico into a sustainably made and delicious jerky.

Since launching Acari in 2016, they have been providing economic opportunities for local communities and sustained natural freshwater ecosystems. Their progress to date was not without snags. As Mitchell describes it, they were “blindsided by regulatory changes” when just starting out. This caused them to be “lean” with finances, fundraise through family and friends, and work side jobs to keep their costs down and incomes steady.

Currently employing seven fish processors and buying from 10 to 15 fishermen in the region, Mike Mitchell of Acarí said, “What’s been especially cool to see is the change in perception of this fish among people in the community.” Local fishermen used to throw away the devil fish they caught, but now they can bring the devil fish they catch, earning double, sometimes triple, the monetary value they were earning when catching only native species.

Joining Acarí on the finalist stage will be Peter Wasserman and Sarrah Nomanbhoy, co-founders of Marhub (2018 Big Ideas winners.) Together, Wasserman and Nomanbhoy have developed a platform that helps forced migrants navigate complex procedures through an empathetic chatbot. This service also provides refugees with customized information and assistance on the social media channels they currently are using.

Despite Marhub’s success, Wasserman stressed early obstacles posed during the “Pioneer Gap” phase. “Several investors we spoke with asked to see more traction, impact, full-time staff, money already raised before they invested,” explained Wasserman. “(They) openly acknowledged that we were in a ‘Catch 22’ — we needed more funds to scale and prove impact, but needed funding to do exactly that.”

MarHub intern Ramah Awad (left) and Jerry Philip (EWMBA ’19) show MarHub’s prototype to NGO staff in the Ritsona Refugee Camp in Greece.

Despite these challenges, Wassermam said Marhub found creative solutions for their funding gap by launching a crowdfunding campaign.

Since the initial pilot launch of their refugee assistance tool in late 2019, Marhub has reached over 15,000 refugees, who have used their tool to access tailored legal information and, where relevant and available, connect to legal aid.

Also honored to be on the Scaling Up virtual stage in June are Noel Aryanyijuka, CEO of Eco Smart Pads, and Anna Sadovnikova, CEO and co-founder of the LiquidGoldConcept.

EcoSmart Pads produces eco-friendly, affordable sanitary pads made from repurposed sugarcane residue to help women from low-income backgrounds with a hygienic, high-quality product for menstrual management. Aryanyijuka noted part of the organization’s success is an increase in the “involvement of school authorities and parents to ensure the girls are supported from the provision of menstrual supplies. ” This was possible through strong partnerships, a clear vision and goal, and empathy for what the girls are going through during menstruation in low-resource environments, explained Aryanyijuka.

Anna Sadovnikova is CEO and co-founder of LiquidGoldConcept, a high-fidelity breastfeeding simulator that is currently developing a virtual simulation platform, the Lactation QBank, to train healthcare providers to use telehealth for lactation support during COVID-19. The organization is now training over 15,000 health care professionals and students in this telehealth skill to prevent unnecessary clinic and emergency room visits

The four Big Ideas Scaling Up finalists have demonstrated adaptability, perseverance, and empathy, leading the way for other early-stage social innovators looking to find solutions for a world in dire need of them.

“In my opinion, COVID-19 is further exposing the great inequities in our society, often disproportionately impacting traditionally underserved communities,” said Wasserman of Marhub. “If anything, these challenging times motivate us to succeed.”

Curiosity, Compassion, and Commitment Define 2019-2020 Big Ideas Innovators

Over the past eight months, this year’s Big Ideas winners have endured through the chaos caused by the October wildfires (seem like ages ago, right?), the unprecedented COVID-19 health crisis, and the shutdowns and global disruptions that ensued.

When I reflect on the social innovators I’ve been privileged to work with over the past ten years, I find they share three attributes:

The Walls to Bridges Team from UC Santa Cruz; Allyssa Tamboura is seated in the center.

The 27 award-winning student teams in this year’s 2019-2020 UC Big Ideas Contest embody these characteristics to a tee. Over the past eight months, they have endured through the chaos caused by the October wildfires (seem like ages ago, right?), the unprecedented COVID-19 health crisis, and the shutdowns and global disruptions that ensued. They have risen to the top of a large and very talented pool of 1,200 student innovators who submitted their visions for more than 400 early stage social ventures.

“The commitment to making a positive social impact doesn’t stop when life throws challenges our way, whether that’s a campus-wide strike or a global pandemic,” said UC Santa Cruz Undergraduate Student Alyssa Tamboura, team lead for Walls to Bridges, a service program designed to repair the devastating impacts of incarceration on families. “Quite the contrary, this commitment has deepened because now more than ever our community needs our support.”

Pradnya Parulekur, a UCLA MBA candidate and co-founder of Wise Earthcare, a company developing oral healthcare products that are 100% biodegradable, also reflected on her team’s resilience. “Literally, overnight, we all became caretakers for our elderly parents, teachers for our children, and the term ‘work/life balance’ took on a whole new level of stress,” she said. “We realized we could panic over the situation or use this focused time to research, develop, and execute the details of our business plan for Wise Earthcare.” Parulekur continued, “Upon reflection, not only did we do our part to keep our community safe by sheltering in place, but we used the time to increase traction in our business venture and to take advantage of fantastic entrepreneurship programming offered by the UC system.”

Ferisca Putri, team lead for BioMilitus, a bioconversion project that rapidly transforms food waste into a valuable, protein-rich, high-fat insect biomass and microbially active soil amendment, added, “What really motivates us is that we believe that our insect-based products can strengthen community resilience by not depending too much on the traditional supply chain of protein that might get disrupted during this chaotic and challenging time.”

The BioMilitus team from UC Davis. From left to right: Jesus Bayo, Trevor Fowles, Lydia Miner, and Ferisca Putri.

This year’s innovators hail from 12 universities and 85 academic disciplines. More than 70% are undergraduates and 40% women. (Also worth noting: 63% of this year’s winning teams are female-led!) The problems Big Ideas participants identified are as diverse as the students tackling them — increasing rates of HIV drug resistance, costly irrigation water loss for smallholder farms, the lack of financial literacy among youths, needless plastic waste in the medical industry, growing pressure on our global food supply chain, to name a few. Among the solutions they plan to develop are:

A point-of-care diagnostic to detect foot and mouth disease in livestock.
A film and associated impact campaign that sheds light on and encourages dialogue around childhood sexual abuse.
A novel, 3D, interfacial solar vapor generation method that uses sunlight to desalinate seawater into purified, drinkable water.
A fun and low-cost math game that allows learners to improve basic numeracy skills and interest in math.

Over the last nine months, the Big Ideas team, along with our amazing global network of over 300 judges and mentors, have been fortunate to support these students as they shape their ideas into strategic roadmaps for social ventures. The premise behind Big Ideas is that by providing a diverse body of students with a structure and framework, along with educational resources and seed funding, they will deliver innovative solutions to pressing global problems. This has proven to be a successful model for fostering innovation. Over its 14-year history, Big Ideas has catalyzed a range of high-impact startups such as We Care Solar, CellScope, Dost Education, Somo Project, Bolt Threads, and Back to the Roots. These and other teams have received $2.5 million in Big Ideas funding and raised an additional $650 million in investment.

Raymond Lee, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Information and CEO of FakeNetAI, a technology company that detects deepfake videos and other manipulated online content, explained the contest has introduced him to other founders across the UC campuses and to mentors who have provided “invaluable business and technology insight.”

“The Big Ideas Contest’s structured proposal requirements provided FakeNetAI with clear guidance on how to properly assess business viability and impact,” said Lee. “They inspired us to rigorously think through the problem and solution.”

Peter Kavuma of Makerere University in Uganda and team lead of the Automated Ambu Bag System (AABS), a low-cost respiratory support system for long-term emergency unit patients in low-income countries, noted that Big Ideas Contest support catalyzed their project. “Big Ideas offered us a growth platform during the application process through activities like mentor pairing and judging feedback,” Kavuma said. “This has been crucial.”

One of my favorite comments about innovation, which I think exemplifies the spirit of Big Ideas, comes from former UC Berkeley Engineering Dean Richard Newton, who helped launch the contest. He said, “What we’ve found at Berkeley about how to get people to work together is that you define some kind of very big problem that needs to be solved, and attack it from a range of viewpoints.”

After seeing how student teams persevered during this incredibly challenging year, I am confident–now more than ever–that this generation of problem solvers and inventors possess the curiosity, compassion, and commitment for the multi-pronged attacks needed to make this world a better place for all. Please read about the more than two dozen Big Ideas teams who won this year’s top awards in the slideshow below. Fiat Lux!

About Big Ideas: The Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas Contest provides students with funding, support, and mentorship for developing their social ventures. Since its launch in 2006, Big Ideas has received over 2,500 proposals, supported more than 8,000 students from multiple universities, and provided seed funding for participants that have gone on to secure over $650 million in additional funding. The Big Ideas contest is made possible through the generous support of the Rudd Family Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation-Acumen Student Social Innovation Challenge, and the University of California Office of the President, as well as track sponsors CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), and the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

2020 Big Ideas Award Winners Announced!

In November 2019, the Big Ideas Contest received a record 438 pre-proposal applications, representing over 1,200 students across 12 campuses. After a preliminary round, 43 teams were advanced to the final round.

In November 2019, the Big Ideas Contest received 438 pre-proposal applications, representing over 1,200 students across 12 campuses. After a preliminary round and a final review, 27 teams were awarded prizes across 8 different categories, with award amounts ranging from $5,000 to $10,000. In September 2020 the seven top projects will participate in a pitch competition for Grand Prize honors and an additional $10,000 award (The exact date and time for Grand Prize Pitch Day will be announced in July.)

Grand Prize Finalists

To learn more about these teams and their projects, please contact the Big Ideas staff at bigideas@berkeley.edu.

(Italics below indicate the project’s Primary Social Impact Track and designated Team Lead)

AIDS-Tech (Makerere University)
Social Impact Track(s): Global Health
Team: Brian Nyiro, Bright Sharon Amanya, Brenda Nakandi
The broader access to antiretroviral drugs has led not only to considerable reductions in morbidity and mortality but, unfortunately, has increased the risk of virologic failure due to emergence and potential transmission of drug-resistant viruses. AIDS-tech will be a portable point of care diagnostic test that detects HIV drug resistance mutations in patient blood samples within 120 minutes, with an estimated sensitivity of 80-90% at an estimated cost of $50. A rechargeable battery (8-hour half-life) will be fitted to support a full day’s testing to use in field settings where access to electricity is limited. Results will be interpreted with a naked eye (observing color change on the strips), hence eliminating the need for computers and software. This will aid timely acquisition of resistance results and guide clinicians on which regime to start the patient and thus improve treatment outcome. It will also aid in the World Health Organization’s target to limit the number of patients with HIV.

Grand Prize Finalist

BioMilitus (UC Davis)
Social Impact Track(s): Food & Agriculture, Energy & Resources
Team: Ferisca Putri, Trevor Fowles, Lydia Palma
Agricultural co-products and other food wastes are used as feedstock for insects, which are later harvested for biomass, rich in proteins and fats valued as animal feed ingredient. Consequently, the bioconverted food waste is transformed into a microbially active insect compost known as frass, which may be used as a soil amendment for crops. Given that 3 million tons of organic waste are generated each year from California alone, this resource represents a significant opportunity for insect bioconversion. BioMilitus leverages the bioconversion potential of black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) as a solution for bridging the gap between the increasing global food demand and abundant organic waste. In order to realize the idea’s full potential, BioMilitus has further innovated this process through the engineering of growing conditions, specialized blends of wastes used as feed stock, and specially bred lines of insect larvae targeted for more efficient bioconversion of waste.

ChemCath (UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Global Health
Team: Serena Blacklow
Even a patient monitored every 4 hours can undergo quick physiological changes (e.g. shock) that threaten their health because they are not detected fast enough. ChemCath is a sensor-embedded modification of a current catheter that will enable early identification of these deleterious events by continuously monitoring physiologic and chemical data without requiring blood draws. Leveraging recent advances in micro- and nano-science, ChemCath’s biosensors will quickly detect changes in pH to start, but future work will facilitate measurement of other important biomarkers such as sodium, potassium, and glucose. Though initially intended for hospital use, ChemCath will also pave the way for close at-home monitoring of patients on home health, preferentially benefiting the elderly, disabled, and those in rural communities who have more difficulty accessing healthcare facilities.

Earth Voices (UC Davis)
Social Impact Track(s): Art & Social Change, Energy & Resources, Education & Literacy
Team: Bernardo Bastien, Raiza Pilatowsky
The majority of American adults think global warming is happening, but almost half of American adults do not think it will affect their personal life. This is because of political bias and psychological distance to the consequences of climate change. Many projects, such as video-blogs, summer camps, and public outreach activities have been tackling these challenges to increase public engagement and desirable attitudes towards environmental problems. Earth Voices is an interactive podcast that guides listeners through an immersive experience, while walking a predetermined route in a city. Listeners would learn more about the different spheres of the Earth system and their relation with society through an embodied experience that will bring them closer to understanding the climate and the modern environmental problems society faces, as well as visualize themselves as part of the solution. Earth Voices will be available for free online and through main podcast platforms.

EdVisorly (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Education & Literacy, Energy & Resources, Cities & Communities
Team: Manny Smith, Christian Millsop, Alyson Isaacs, Daniel Smith
EdVisorly is pioneering equitable access to higher education, and we understand that many aspiring community college students cannot commit as much time to planning their academic journey. Higher education in the United States has become less accessible to underserved ethnic minorities, immigrants, and those from socio economically depressed communities. While there are many factors that contribute to the cumulative disadvantages in equity within our country, education is among the most evident and consequential. Today, EdVisorly is leveraging the latest technology in data analytics, machine learning, and software development to simplify and optimize the community college degree planning process. EdVisorly will allow students the unbiased freedom to plan faster and pivot seamlessly in their education with full transparency and support, resulting in increased enrollment, retention, and graduation rates.

Grand Prize Finalist

FakeNetAI (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Art & Social Change
Team: Raymond Lee, Vijay Singh
Over one billion hours of video are uploaded to the internet daily. Deepfakes, videos manipulated using deep learning techniques, represent a tiny fraction of those videos but are growing rapidly, doubling in the past nine months. Deepfake quality is improving to the point where the best are unidentifiable by human reviewers–and already have been used for nefarious purposes, including inserting a person into pornography or manipulating politics. As a result of the growing quality and ability to insert Deepfakes into a sea of uploaded content, the risk of their spreading and causing damage for content hosting companies is increasing. It is critical to be able to identify and react to Deepfakes by flagging or removing them. FakeNetAI’s Deepfake detection technology enables content hosting platforms to detect Deepfake content to counteract this growing threat. FakeNetAI’s technologies allow companies to respond to the threat even as Deepfakes continue to grow exponentially.

Grand Prize Finalist

FootMo Kit (Makerere University)
Social Impact Track(s): Food & Agriculture, Workforce Development, Financial Inclusion
Team:Richard Mushusha, Bernadine Kichoncho, Leonidas Kyarisiima
Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the world’s fastest growing human populations. The expansion of the livestock population is necessary to address this population growth, however the output depends critically on livestock productivity, which is generally poor across the region’s various production systems. Currently, 25% of livestock in sub-Saharan Africa die due to highly contagious and viral Foot and Mouth disease and 65% of this livestock in Uganda is predominantly cattle. FootMo Kit is a hand-held device that detects Foot and Mouth Disease in livestock in hard-to-reach and under-served areas through early disease detection. The kit is simple to use and is a low-cost device that is put in the mouths of a cattle that detects the disease against the antigen content in the saliva. FootMo Kit addresses poverty, well-being, and sustainable development, as well as empowers farmers to detect diseases without relying on the veterinary doctors.

Gastro-Bag Project (Makerere University)
Social Impact Track(s): Global Health
Team: Nabuuma Olivia Peace, Cheptoek Davis, Marissa Donadio, Alexandra Walker
The mortality rate for neonates in Uganda with Gastroschisis is 98% compared to high-income countries with less than 4%. Gastroschisis is a congenital anomaly birth defect in which abdominal organs protrude through a small opening right of the umbilical cord. The difference in the survival rate between low-income countries and high-income countries is largely caused by failure to keep the neonates hydrated, nourished, and infection-free while their bowel is outside the abdomen. This is because silo-bags used to put the bowel back into the baby’s abdomen cost approximately $240 which is 140% of the average monthly income in Uganda. The Gastro-Bag Project has developed and tested a low-cost silo-bag for treatment and management of Gastroschisis using locally available materials in Uganda at a cost of less than $5. The Gastro-Bag Project intends to demonstrate feasibility and improvements in quality, efficacy, operability, costs, and accessibility of Gastroschisis to improve human health.

Grand Prize Finalist

HelioVap (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Energy & Resources
Team: Kelly Conway, Casey Finnerty, Druva Chandrasekhar
Across the 2,700 islands of Indonesia, one in eight households lack clean water access. Traditional desalination technologies have too high energy requirements, costs, and brine discharges to be implemented in these coastal communities. As a result, households often purchase bottled water, which is both expensive and environmentally damaging. HelioVap is a floating, stand-alone desalination device that can provide reliable water access to coastal communities through an off-grid, zero-liquid discharge process that directly uses sunlight to separate seawater into its fundamental components. HelioVap is being designed to produce 75 L of water per day, which should be sufficient to meet the drinking and cooking requirements of five households through the utilization of alternative energy sources including sunlight, wind, and natural temperature gradients. This technology does not threaten biodiversity in the coastal ecosystems that over 50% of the population relies on for income, and the use of alternative energy sources reduces cost and carbon emissions of the process.

Impactify (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Cities & Communities, Art & Social Change, Education & Literacy
Team: Annie Sheoran, Jennifer Pfister, Daniel Haim, Soniya Parmar Anahita Saidi
Impactify is an app that aims to mobilize young people for social or environmental justice action by (1) educating them on the most urgent societal challenges and (2) showing them concrete, effective ways to be a changemaker. We believe anyone can be a changemaker. Our research showed that GenZ wants to be part of the solution, not the problems (climate crisis, rising inequality, racism, sexism etc.). However, most young people do not know how concretely they can contribute to change. This should not be an obstacle for social justice action, as there are so many different ways anyone can make a difference and stand up for human dignity and the planet. Impactify’s solution will not only raise awareness on societal and environmental issues, but also suggest effective social engagement opportunities ranging from advocacy work to volunteering.

Lyzapay (Makerere University)
Social Impact Track(s): Financial Inclusion, Workforce Development, Education & Literacy
Team: Dickson Mwesiga, Solomon Oshabaheebwa, Samson Natamba, Paul Muwanguzi, Syson Natukunda, Tony Blair Nasasira
Youth in Uganda start business ventures with little or no knowledge of financial management or good business practices and with limited access to capital. About 50% of this population has little or no assets to put up for collateral for loans and they do not come from rich families to get capital. Without these resources, businesses are bound to fail, resulting in a vicious cycle of youth unemployment, food insecurity, and under performance of the economy. Lyzapay is a mobile application platform that gives both financial literacy and access to capital to business owners in Uganda. The application analyzes the entrepreneur’s personal data, business financial records, assets, and financial literacy to compute a credit score. This is integrated with a financial advisory platform that has a series of customized training modules and tools tailored to suit the Ugandan setting. Lyzapay will enhance the local entrepreneurs’ knowledge of financial management and good business practices.

Mabinju Borehole Project (UC Davis)
Social Impact Track(s): Global Health, Food & Agriculture, Energy & Resources
Team: Shana Roostaie, Claire Winter, Krista Blide, Sergio Jimenez, Aidan Ferguson
In the community of Mabinju, Kenya, 3,500 people have limited access to clean water for agriculture and basic needs. Lake Victoria, the main water source in Siaya county where Mabinju is located, is infested with water hyacinth and contaminated with fluoride and traces of copper (II) and zinc (III), which cause rapid spread of disease throughout the region. The Mabinju Borehole Project will address the lack of accessible clean water in the region by installing a borehole that uses a solar-powered pump to extract groundwater. The project aims to provide enough potable water for the community’s needs. With this accessibility, the residents will no longer have to rely on polluted, stagnant water from Lake Victoria. The rate of water-borne illnesses, such as cholera and dysentery, will decrease and the community’s income and food, which relies substantially on their agriculture, will further thrive with an abundance of clean and accessible water.

Matica (Makerere University)
Social Impact Track(s): Education & Literacy, Art & Social Change
Team: Brian Matovu, Julius Mugaga, Solomon Oshabaheebwa, Lydia Akino, Fredrick Bulondo
Mathematics is vital in the development of elementary skills like creativity, problem solving, and innovation, yet many children go through school with little knowledge and skill in the subject. Understanding the subject of mathematics is necessary because it not only drives improved performance in STEM, but also improves general intelligence to solving everyday challenges. Matica is a novel, low-cost mathematics game that improves mathematical learning, critical thinking, and mental work among children in Uganda and other resource-limited countries without proper infrastructure and capital investments to use high-end technologies. Matica allows learners to have fun with mathematics, while they play and interact with their teachers, parents, and peers. It has been designed as an eccentric mathematical social learning tool for learners to improve basic skills in mathematics, arithmetic computations, competencies, and interests through social interaction and playing like other ordinary card games, employing Matica’s mission to provide every child the platform to love and succeed in Mathematics.

Mindset & Milestones (UC Los Angeles)
Social Impact Track(s): Art & Social Change, Education & Literacy, Workforce Development
Team: Diondraya Taylor
While the battle for gender equity continues, girls have to be prepared to succeed in society as it stands. That requires the confidence to fight for a seat at existing tables and the confidence to create new ones. Plainly stated, girls need educational and engaging spaces. Mindset & Milestones seeks to address the problem of self-efficacy, confidence, and opportunity deficits for girls by introducing them to entrepreneurial learning curriculum. The primary delivery of the curriculum will be via the workbook “Mindset & Milestones: A Girl’s Guide to Thinking Like An Entrepreneur” and in-person workshops. Entrepreneurship is not only a powerful way to exercise problem-solving skills, but it also allows girls to find the value in their ideas and find a way to succeed in the face of adversity. In the end, the vision is for girls to leave programs feeling like they have the ability to create something from nothing and contribute to any environment.

NeoMotion AI (UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Global Health
Team: Mathias Vissers, Wei-Kai Lin, Nikhil Yerasi,
Stroke rehabilitation is often inaccessible, expensive, and requires a lot of scarce, highly trained professionals. By harnessing the processing power of smartphones in combination with recent advances in artificial intelligence, NeoMotion AI will be able to improve rehabilitation at a worldwide scale. NeoMotion AI is run on AI-based pose estimation algorithms and it optimizes them for usage on smartphones without internet connection. Using a smartphone camera and this software, the solution involves tracking the coordinates of every joint of the upper and lower limbs, proving patients, rehabilitation specialists, and physicians with a tool to track patient’s rehabilitation progress over time. At a later stage, performing rehabilitation exercises in front of a smartphone would allow patients to receive personalized exercise corrections or new and adaptive exercises suggestions. NeoMotion AI can provide an engaging rehabilitation experience for stroke patients through a social platform, creating a sense of community, and a more integrated management system for physical therapists or physicians.

PIC.ME (UC Santa Barbara)
Social Impact Track(s): Education & Literacy, Workforce Development
Team: Talitha Buschor, Arjun Gathwala
Approximately one third of people with autism are nonverbal, resulting in a rising need for a user-friendly, socio-culturally relevant means of assistive technology to help them communicate. PIC.ME: Personalized Interactive Communication Made for Everyone is an app that can be downloaded onto a personal smart device, such as a smartphone or tablet, for people with exceptional needs, such as autism, or other language disabilities. Users can personalize pictures used for picture exchange communication that are culturally and socially relevant to their lives, record vocalizations for words and sounds to match pictures, and practice language and social skills with games. This app will not be limited to people with autism, but will be accessible for any person living with a disability that causes a loss of the ability to effectively communicate. PIC.ME will not only make assistive technology more available to all, but it will make the right of communication more equitable for all.

Signum (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Workforce Development, Education & Literacy, Cities & Communities
Team: Sahil Mehta, Arth Vidyarthi, Raghav Singh, Suyash Jaju
Unemployment and underemployment affect roughly 70% of all Americans in the deaf community. Signum is a video chat solution created to solve this problem. Designed as a workforce development tool, Signum utilizes a machine learning model to translate video of ASL gestures to text, easing communication for people with hearing and speech impairments who can only communicate in ASL. Although several other startups are currently developing similar technologies, Signum distinguishes a gap in the market due to its emphasis on providing an inexpensive and non-intrusive means of communication targeted towards removing barriers in the workplace. Signum’s current target market is “functionally deaf” ASL users in the workforce between 18 and 35-years old. Signum will be used in conjunction with popular workforce video chat platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Cisco WebEx to expand to a broader audience and impact millions of lives.

Grand Prize Finalist

Sundial Foods, Inc. (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Food & Agriculture, Global Health, Energy & Resources
Team: Jessica Schwabach, Siwen Deng
Meat consumption in the United States has risen in recent years, and despite a variety of activism efforts, the trend shows little sign of slowing down. The alternative meats industry seeks to provide sustainable alternatives to meat in order to provide the experience of meat consumption without the environmental cost; however, current products are expensive, highly processed, and rarely healthy. Sundial Foods’ mission is to alleviate the global environmental and public health burden of concentrated animal agriculture. Sundial Foods is revolutionizing the alternative meat industry by developing a new method for the creation of these products that relies upon a biological approach to meat structure in order to inform the creation of a product that looks, cooks, and tastes like animal chicken. The processing method in development is significantly more efficient than the methods currently used in the alternative meat industry, and makes use of whole plant ingredients rather than micronutrient-depleted protein isolates.

Suppression of Evaporation and Percolation Water Losses with Novel Infiltration Insert Method to Improve Plant Yield Utilizing Carbon Sequestration (UC Santa Barbara)
Social Impact Track(s): Food & Agriculture, Energy & Resources
Team: Visala Tallavarjula
Increasing global population requires 70% more food production by 2050, predominantly cultivated in developing countries and areas with an arid climate. Irrigation consumes more than 80% of the world’s fresh water. Traditional irrigation practices suffer from evaporation and percolation loss of freshwater and existing efficient technologies are very expensive and not economically viable for developing world. The purpose of this innovation is to develop and implement an economically viable technique and devices to reduce irrigation water loss and apply them to micro-irrigation to help small farm owners in the developing world. The proposed infiltration system inserts under drip emitters mimic SDI and delivers water to the root zone. Then engineered perlite/peat-moss topsoil beds suppresses evaporation loss by locking water in the pores and a percolation control layer at the root zone uses charcoal amendment to retain water and improve root health/plant yield, ultimately working to reduce the water footprint of agriculture in arid regions.

Grand Prize Finalist

The Automated Ambu Bag System (Makerere University)
Social Impact Track(s): Global Health
Team: Peter Kavuma, Maureen Etuket, Joseph Tumwesigye, David Kato
There is a dire need to invest in intermediate care bridging from the resuscitative efforts in the Emergency Units and the supportive care offered by the intensive care units in Uganda. This leads to a high prevalence of missed opportunities for patients requiring advanced ventilatory support at Emergency Units. This is due to there being only 33 Intensive Care beds with Mechanical Ventilators for the whole population of Uganda. The Automated Ambu BagSystem (AABS) is automated and designed to provide controlled ventilatory support to patients with respiratory failure. The project is aimed at utilising the existing and relatively affordable bagging technology proving vital features of an Advanced Ventilatory Support System. The principle of the bag is through the compression of the Ambu Bag, which uses a piston run by a mortar. The device is light and of medium size, which allows it to be easily moved to different bed stations without it being stolen.

The Mobius Project (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Cities & Communities
Team: Nicole Chi, Ji Su Yoo
These days, tech companies constantly have to admit that they are not fully equipped to deal with all of the ways bad actors can use their platforms or technologies to cause harm – and the ways their product can disproportionately harm particular groups of people. The Mobius Project is a knowledge and research platform that provides practical ways to incorporate abusability testing into existing product life cycles and teams, drawing from existing expertise from privacy, security, scholars, and digital activists. This platform will gather a community of people interested in combating platform abuse, tools and frameworks that product teams can integrate into their software development project life cycle, and a searchable database of platform abuses to make it easier to identify product risks.

Theater to Heighten Community Voices: Dharavi Slum (UC Davis)
Social Impact Track(s): Art & Social Change, Cities & Communities
Team: Lauren Low, Sarah Covault
Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India, which boasts a unique economy and culture, is currently threatened with destruction due to the government’s plan for redevelopment. This project seeks to use theater as a means of uplifting community voices to preserve the neighborhood. Through a series of workshops, young participants will develop creative means of telling their personal stories about the positive aspects of their community, as well as the challenges they face. This will culminate in the creation of an original show, which will be performed for both slum residents and the greater Mumbai area, celebrating community voices and combating negative perceptions about the slum. The project also serves as a means of qualitative data collection in a severely under-researched area. This project seeks to promote a humanizing perspective of a particularly marginalized group of people with the hopes that the government and wider Mumbai society will learn about the wealth of culture Dharavi holds.

TRIPLE C: Clean Clay Cookstoves (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Art & Social Change, Workforce Development, Global Health, Energy & Resources
Team: Tina Piracci, Alexander (Sandy) Curth
According to the World Health Program, more than three billion of the world’s population do not have access to clean cooking facilities and still rely on solid fuels such as wood, animal dung, charcoal, crop wastes, and coal for cooking and heating. These fuels are burned in extremely inefficient and highly polluting stoves and one of the world’s greatest environmental health risk factors is exposure to the emissions from these cooking stoves. This project proposes a new mechanism of self-generated air flow that boosts combustion and helps neutralize smoke. The proposed 3D printed clay stove is a doubly walled enclosure with a hollow in between, incorporating built-in apertures at the base of the exterior wall and at the top of the interior wall. The stove could be manufactured locally on-site using clay that is almost free and available anywhere. The stove capitalizes on additive manufacturing technology to leverage local material into high performing micro-infrastructure that offsets environmental and economic costs.

Viberent (UC San Diego)
Social Impact Track(s): Energy & Resources
Team: Tiffany Wang, Diana Valdes, Richard Miller, Tatiana Podhajny, Jefferson Lei, Ruixiao Liu, Arthur Miranda, Khoa Nguyen, Nam Nguyen, Tanay Patil, Aku Saraf
While it is essential for fashion brands to reuse and recycle clothes, their efforts will not significantly reduce their carbon footprint in the long run because the rate of clothing production and consumption is only going to accelerate. Sustainable fashion ultimately means less fashion, which contradicts fashion’s current linear “take, make, and waste” model. This project helps fashion brands achieve on-demand production by supplying color-changing fibers to be spun into garments, minimizing the risk of overproduction. At the retail store, shoppers will be the ones to customize the color of their garments at the color-changing stations. Viberent’s technology has the potential to redefine the 3 R’s: Reduce textile and dye waste, Reuse clothes in a completely new way, and use Recycled material to create color-changing fibers. Let’s close the loop and transform linear fashion into circular fashion.

Walls to Bridges (UC Santa Cruz)
Social Impact Track(s): Cities & Communities, Education & Literacy
Team: Alyssa Tamboura, Alyssa Scarsciotti, Paola Leon, Shelby Richards, Daisjah Sheperd
Walls to Bridges is a pilot program in partnership with the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz (CRC) designed to address communication issues between incarcerated parents and their adult-age children in Santa Cruz. Using restorative justice practices and principles, the program will facilitate confidential dialogues regarding the impact of incarceration on relationships and planning for communication resolutions, such as letters, phone calls, and visits. The dialogues will take place between incarcerated parents and their adult-age children within a Santa Cruz County jail. The process focuses on the procedural aspect of healing, like what steps need to be taken to address the harm and reduce the adverse outcomes for families impacted by incarceration. A research aspect will inform for potential expansion with the CRC as well as replication for other restorative justice or criminal justice reform organizations. Walls To Bridges has the potential to inform the public of familial incarceration challenges and help make policy recommendations.

Grand Prize Finalist

When You Were Young (UC Berkeley)
Social Impact Track(s): Art & Social Change, Global Health, Financial Inclusion
Team: Tracey Quezeda
When You Were Young represents a previously untold story about child sexual abuse and healing from the perspective of a black woman, through her own courageous emergence on screen. This impact campaign, accompanying the film, will be the first to address the needs and interests of the audience by focusing on black girls and women and creating a safe space for public conversations, specifically in black communities. The lack of such films has historically left communities of color feeling invisible, a feeling that is only compounded for a victim of child sexual abuse. The film follows Aqueila Lewis, an adult survivor of child sexual abuse, as she works to confront the generational cycle of child sexual abuse within her family. When You Were Young’s campaign will include a pre-viewing guide featuring support and resources for people directly impacted by child sexual abuse, as well as indirectly impacted allies, family members, and community.

Wise Earthcare (UC Los Angeles)
Social Impact Track(s): Energy & Resources, Global Health
Team: Pradnya Parulekar, Belinda Lau, Scott Panitz, Ingrid Vining, Amish, Chhita, Will Hawkins
Over 1.2 billion plastic toothbrushes are thrown away in the United States every year–enough to fill up 1,100 shipping containers. The problem is that 99% of those toothbrushes are made from plastic that is non-recyclable and they end up in landfills or the ocean, contributing to the increase of pollution. The solution is a toothbrush that is 100% biodegradable, clinically validated by the American Dental Association, which is delivered directly to the consumer via subscription, retail, and dental offices. These products will be both clinically effective and sustainable and will include an array of oral care products, including toothbrushes for adults and kids, electric toothbrush replacement heads, floss, floss picks, toothpaste, and mouthwash. With validation from the ADA and both dentists and consumers regarding the design, this product can ensure that patients/users are receiving the best possible oral healthcare products, while still playing a positive role in the sustainability movement.

Amplifying Marginalized Voices through Film

Skylar Economy, independent filmmaker and co-founder and director of Photogénie Films, notices a gap in the stories large media companies tell.

Big Ideas Winner Skylar Economy on Arts Entrepreneurship

Between semesters at UC Berkeley, Skylar Economy, independent filmmaker and co-founder and director of Photogénie Films, interned for CNN’s documentary unit. Although the experience gave her valuable filmmaking skills, the 26-year-old from San Diego said it also made her notice a gap in the stories large media companies tell.

“I pushed so hard for stories that mainstream media may not have been covering and they were always rejected,” said Economy, which made her realize her skills “could be used elsewhere.”

Journalists are taught to remain detached from their stories, Economy explained, yet when directing her own films, she hopes to do the opposite.

“It feels so weird to work with people, or to film them, and not have some kind of bond with them or try to help them outside of the film,” she explained.

Since graduating from UC Berkeley in 2016 with a BA in Media Studies, Economy has pursued a career in arts entrepreneurship, co-founding Photogénie Films and directing and producing documentary films that amplify the voices of marginalized communities.

“Film is such a huge tool… it has a story, a visual component and artistry,” said Economy on her quest to challenge audiences’ judgments or preconceptions about different communities.

Arts entrepreneurship, however, hasn’t been an easy career path. On top of running Photogénie Films, Economy works as a freelance filmmaker, balancing work that guarantees an income with her own creative projects.

“It’s about managing your freelance work, while not overdoing yourself and also being true to maintaining time for your own art as well,” said Economy, noting she often finds herself working long hours and weekends to find time for telling the stories she loves.

“When I’m highlighting people and the real issues they face, it makes me want to do it even more,” she explained. “I become even more energized to create a film.”

During her sophomore year, Economy took Richard Andrew’s arts entrepreneurship class, which she said, “Opened my eyes to everything that goes into an arts business” and inspired her to apply to the Big Ideas Contest. In 2016, she won the Contest for directing and producing “From Incarceration to to Education (FITE),” a documentary that depicts the experiences of formerly incarcerated UC Berkeley students.

That same year, the premiere of “FITE” on the UC Berkeley campus sold out, which Economy said exposed her to the power of filmmaking. After the premiere, audience members wanted to know how they could help the students she documented.

She explained that recently a community college student, who had previously served 19 years in prison and viewed the “FITE” screening on the UCLA campus in 2017, was recently admitted to UC Berkeley as a transfer student. The student told her viewing the film had inspired him to keep pursuing education. “That impact alone was absolutely incredible,” she said.

Since “FITE”, Economy has directed and produced several other short documentaries she sees missing from mainstream media. Currently, she is directing her first feature-length documentary “Lifers” about the Lifers Group, a hip-hop group that formed in the Rahway State Prison in the early 1990s. In 1992, the group became the world’s first hip-hop band to be nominated for a Grammy while incarcerated.

Economy explained the idea for the film was inspired by Maxwell Melvins, founder of the Lifers Group, who reached out to her after viewing “FITE”. She remembers Melvins told her, “What you did through your film, we do through our music.”

Economy said she and Melvins aim to show that inmates can defy odds and battle stigma. The producers of “Lifers” are currently nearing the end of their development phase and looking for funding.

Economy underscored that although being an arts entrepreneur, freelance journalist, and independent filmmaker isn’t always easy, if she “can make an impact with every single film that I do,” her goal will be achieved.

Big Ideas Mentor and Innovation Ambassador: Breaking Down Barriers for Social Entrepreneurs

As a new media professional, working with emerging technologies and Big Ideas Mentor and Innovation Ambassador, Parul Wadhwa says social innovation can improve the lives of marginalized communities.

Parul Wadhwa

New media professional and Big Ideas Mentor and Innovation Ambassador, Parul Wadhwa, hopes to make social innovation more accessible for marginalized communities.

As a new media professional, working with emerging technologies and Big Ideas Mentor and Innovation Ambassador, Parul Wadhwa says social innovation can improve the lives of marginalized communities. She thinks pursuing social entrepreneurship, however, continues to pose barriers for the student, women, and minority innovators who can make the biggest impact.

Big Ideas sat down with Wadhwa to learn more about her interests in social entrepreneurship, the impacts of virtual reality as a new media platform, and how she dedicates her career to breaking down these barriers in order to make entrepreneurship more accessible for minority groups.

Why is social entrepreneurship important?

Social entrepreneurship solves important problems by creative innovations, but it also keeps in mind the kind of people who are affected or benefiting from it. There are a lot of interesting innovations that are taking place in the world right now and a lot of people, especially our marginalized innovators, get left behind. Social entrepreneurship makes space for all kinds of people.

Why do you think it’s important for students to have access to resources and leadership when pursuing a new venture?

There is a difference between having an idea and seeing it come to fruition, whether that's in the form of a company or in the form of an innovation, a product, or service. We all have great ideas, but how these ideas can be beneficial, speak a universal language, and impact a larger audience is a totally different equation. As a Big Ideas Innovation Ambassador, it was very interesting to reach out to undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz and the larger UC community to tell them how a platform like Big Ideas can be instrumental in shaping impactful companies. Students have a lot of interesting ideas and they are very enthusiastic about creating change in the world. I think that platforms, like Big Ideas, tap into that very enthusiastic energy and make sure that those ideas come into fruition.

What are some changes to the entrepreneurial field you think are necessary in order to make it more accessible for women, students, and minorities?

There’s a lot of gatekeeping that happens in entrepreneurship and you see a lot of people keeping different kinds of people outside. There need to be a lot more training programs, there need to be incubators, there needs to be a lot of accelerators that are specifically focused on providing that access and opening up resources for women, students, and minorities.

What do you think is the power of virtual reality to effectively tell the stories of marginalized communities?

Virtual Reality (VR) has the ability to create empathy for the social causes that you are talking about and it’s important to bring that technology into the hands of people who would never have the opportunity to access it. VR is such a powerful, immersive environment because it can teleport people to be in someone else’s shoes or interact with somebody they have never met before.

Why do you think it’s important to support women in entrepreneurial environments?

Being a woman entrepreneur myself and having gone through the challenges, I feel that it’s really important for me to give back to that community and to build a solid system of support for people to make sure that they have access to the opportunities that I had. A platform like WiseHer is really close to my heart because we are a bunch of interesting entrepreneurs from all around the world, mostly women, who are using our expertise to develop small innovations for entrepreneurs anywhere around the world.

I get the opportunity to work with businesswomen in India and Nigeria who have great ideas, but have never had access to micro-investments or have even been taught about business. The fact that a small idea, for women mostly in India or Nigeria, could take them to a platform where they can support their families and build a business that can bring change in the world, is something so exciting, unique, and organic to see.

What is the biggest piece of advice you would give to aspiring student entrepreneurs?

I think my biggest take away from working with students and being an entrepreneur myself, is that as women, minorities, and students, we often don’t have a lot of faith in our ideas. And the biggest challenge that we face is who do we talk to? And is my idea going to be stolen? My biggest advice is don’t be afraid to talk about your idea and have confidence in it. The more you talk about your idea, the greater the chances you will come across the right people and the right resources which will help you shape that idea into an innovation.

Any final thoughts?

There’s a lot more that goes into an innovation than just having a seed idea, so talk about your idea as much as you can, look out for mentors as you can, and access the kinds of resources that are available around you. In short, be enterprising and strategic.

It’s time that we start innovating outside of the buildings and start talking and connecting to as many people as we can, especially the people we are creating the product and innovation for.

Big Ideas Entrepreneurs Respond to COVID-19

For many entrepreneurs who come out of the University of California’s Big Ideas social innovation contest, the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic are motivating them to find creative ways to shift their business strategies to stay busy and afloat.

In 2010, when Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora launched Back to the Roots, a company that manufactures indoor gardening kits to connect families to food sourcing and urban gardening, it was the peak of the financial crisis. Velez remembers his mentor, Nicolas Jammet, co-founder of Sweetgreen, told him:

“Don’t let a crisis go to waste. Take this opportunity to make yourself better and take advantage of what you have in front of you.”

For Mike Mitchell, CEO and co-founder of Acarí, a company that transforms the invasive devil fish in Mexico into a sustainably made jerky, this means shifting sales emphasis to online marketing and social media, while accelerating plans to launch their product on Amazon.

For Christelle Rohaut, CEO of Codi an online platform that connects remote workers to residents looking to earn additional income to help with housing affordability, the temporary pause in physical operations has allowed her team to focus on new hires and product design.

“Almost the whole world is working from home and this actually gives us a broad pool of people who understand the benefits of Codi firsthand,” said Rohaut, who anticipates a much greater demand on neighborhood co-working spaces after the shelter-in-place orders are lifted.

“There were a lot of unicorns that were born out of the recession in 2008, so I think a lot of innovations will be born out of this as well,” she added.

In a blog for GeekWire, Dan Rosen, chair of Seattle-based startup investment group Alliance of Angels, listed eight tips on how startups can survive the economic crisis. He wrote:
“If you have a way to shift some or all of your business to be part of a solution to the COVID-19 problem, stay alert to do so.”

One example of this strategy is Big Ideas winner Takataka Plastics, whose founders, UC Berkeley Development and Mechanical Engineering PhD Student Paige Balcom and Peter Okwoko of Gulu University, are shifting their products from recycled construction goods to face shields for Ugandan doctors treating COVID-19 patients.

“I think (COVID-19) is going to fuel new innovations and new ideas, even for existing initiatives,” said Balcom. “We thought about how Takataka could help its community in this difficult time.”

Arushi Wasan, growth and program lead of Dost Education, an EdTech nonprofit that helps parents of any literacy level support their child’s early learning at home in India, said her team has initiated a two-week coronavirus audio education program for its 8,000 families subscribed in India.

Amelia Phillips, executive director of SOMO — an accelerator in Nairobi and Kisumu, Kenya that provides entrepreneurs training, tailored business advising, funding, and assistance with market access — is also pivoting. Her nonprofit has begun providing care packages, which contain food and health products sourced from local businesses for vulnerable families in Nairobi.

“Entrepreneurs think: What is the world I imagine and how am I going to be a part of creating that world?” said Phillips. “These are the times that entrepreneurs are needed the most.”

For Anna Sadovnikova, co-founder and CEO of LiquidGoldConcept, a company that provides in-person breastfeeding education by manufacturing breastfeeding simulators, shifting in-person education programs to a virtual platform for health professionals has been her priority.

“Due to COVID-19, breastfeeding mothers are not going to have access to their usual in-person support because mothers are being sent home within 24 hours after delivering,” said Sadovnikova, who noted that an overwhelming majority of new mothers are unable to breastfeed successfully after giving birth.

In order to prevent unnecessary clinic and ER visits for infants and mothers during COVID-19, Sadovnikova is developing a free virtual platform where healthcare professionals can learn how to provide timely and skilled lactation support remotely for mothers.

At home with a newborn baby, Ryan Protzko, co-founder of ZestBio, a company that transforms agricultural waste into sustainable chemicals, has gone from testing chemicals in a Berkeley lab, to passing a baby back and forth between himself and his wife as they both navigate working from home.

Protzko and co-founder, Luke Latimer, are locked out of their UC Berkeley lab, which is putting a pause in their research and development phase. Yet this has not stopped them from enlarging their network.

“I actually had to pitch a project while holding my baby,” said Protzko, who noted he could not imagine doing that a few months ago.

Resilience is a common theme among many Big Ideas entrepreneurs–a skill they learn is key to their chosen line of work.

“There’s a lot of potential to take something bad and turn it around,” said Balcom from Gulu, Uganda. “The world is really ripe for new ideas.”

Responding to COVID-19 with Big Ideas

Here’s how other Big Ideas teams are adapting and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic:

Kaloum Bankhi, 2018 Big Ideas winner, is building durable and culturally appropriate houses for residents in Kaloum, Guinea. In response to COVID 19, this project has begun distributing personal protective equipment including buckets with taps that hold dilute bleach which families will use as hand sanitizer (via Twitter).

Marhub, 2018 Big Ideas winner, is a digital platform that enables refugees to navigate bureaucracy and connect with assistance. In response to COVID-19, they are now making accurate coronavirus information accessible to refugees through their digital platform, while aiming to counteract misinformation and empower refugees to protect themselves and stop the spread of the virus.

Copia, 2012 Big Ideas winner, makes healthy food more accessible to people in the community by helping businesses redistribute high-quality excess food to those in need. In response to COVID-19, Copia has launched the initiative #DeliveringwithDignity, which has provided 5,000 meals to individuals and families, while also providing jobs to restaurant workers (via FSR Magazine Article).