Category: Big Ideas

By Sam Goldman

Earlier this fall, UC Berkeley debuted a webpage spotlighting the breadth and depth of its most innovative alumni and the resources available on campus to support the next generation of game-changing entrepreneurs, along with a series of deep-dive stories highlighting Cal founders and their impacts on society. 

The timing couldn’t have been better: Pitchbook recently ranked Berkeley No. 1 for number of venture-backed startup companies, ahead of the likes of Stanford, Harvard, Penn, and MIT. Berkeley innovators like Jennifer Doudna and Kevin Chou generate international headlines. Campus is home to an ever-growing number of entrepreneurship, innovation, and tech-minded organizations and resources.

But — for the aspiring student innovator with a rapidly germinating new idea — where do they start? Where can they access resources and support to help transform their ideas into reality? Where can they find teammates ready to go all-in?

On November 7, that place was Innovators@Cal — UC Berkeley’s annual flagship entrepreneurship event, which brought together aspiring student innovators, students curious about joining early-stage ventures, and an inspirational keynote speaker tackling the “world’s dumbest problem.” 

Students from a wide range of disciplines and departments across the UC Berkeley campus took turns offering two-minute pitches to a standing room–only crowd in Banatao Auditorium. They highlighted a wide range of innovations, including an app detecting stroke symptoms, an electrical grid–monitoring technology, and simple new methods for improving the availability of menstrual products. Immediately after, speakers and listeners alike gathered in Blum Hall for a lively networking and brainstorming session where students used whiteboards to sketch out their ideas, solicit feedback, and find teammates. 

One of those blueprints was for the startup Materri, which generates recommendations for the best materials to use in footwear designers’ products, saving those producers time and money in consulting fees. Materri attended Innovators@Cal hoping to recruit software engineers.

“We’re not software engineers, and we’re building a software platform,” said co-founder Kira Erickson. “So that’s been our main hurdle in becoming a successful startup: just finding engineering talent, so we’re hoping to find some talented people to work with us.”

Across the room was Kerisha Burke, who, after researching why Black people hold a disproportionately low percentage of STEM jobs, found that part of the problem was rooted in student opportunities. “Students from underrepresented backgrounds continue to face challenges in pursuing careers in the STEM industry,” she had told the audience, “particularly due to the lack of access to resources that could help them to succeed.” Many of these resources exist outside the classroom — STEM conferences key among them. But these events are expensive to attend and time-consuming to apply for. 

Enter Burke’s Scholarly Loop, an AI-powered platform consolidating all manner of resources to support underrepresented students throughout the entire conference process, from a list of conferences to travel scholarships to tools that facilitate the paperwork side.

“I’ve been looking for an opportunity to pitch,” she said. “And I thought this was an opportunity for me to be vulnerable, open, and to just take a risk. Hopefully this is the first step in me doing that, then going out there and pitching and just getting more comfortable with sharing my ideas with others.”

The event was sponsored by a host of on-campus organizations, including many student-run, spanning the innovation and entrepreneurial pipeline: Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, AI Entrepreneurs at Berkeley, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, Berkeley Venture Capital, Entrepreneurs@Berkeley, Entrepreneurship@BerkeleyHaas, NSF I-Corps, the Student Entrepreneurship Program, and the Big Ideas Contest, Berkeley’s flagship social-innovation competition (pre-proposals applications are due December 6).

The night’s guest of honor was keynote speaker Komal Ahmad, founder of Copia, a logistics technology platform for managing food waste. Ahmad, winner of the 2012 Big Ideas Contest, studied international health and global development as well as Global Poverty and Practice at UC Berkeley, before her work solving hunger earned her an avalanche of accolades, including landing on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Copia redirects leftover food and meals (including from the Super Bowl and the Oscars) to organizations and people who need it now. The company has saved over 6.5 million tons of food, delivered over 5.4 million meals, generated over $21 million in savings for businesses and nonprofits, and operates in 40 states.

The story behind those eye-popping numbers is a single meal that an undergraduate Ahmad, then studying to be a doctor, hadn’t intended to have. 

Walking down Telegraph Avenue, she encountered a homeless man asking for food, and she invited him to join her for lunch. As he wolfed down his meal, he shared his story: His name was John and he had returned from his second tour in Iraq to find that his military benefits hadn’t kicked in. He hadn’t eaten in three days. And yet, “right across the street,” Ahmad said, “Berkeley’s dining hall was throwing away thousands of pounds of perfectly edible food.” 

Hunger was not a problem of insufficient food, she realized, but a logistics and distribution problem. 

“Solving the world’s dumbest problem became my life’s mission and Copia’s purpose,” she said. “Had I never reached out to that homeless veteran, had I never looked up from my phone, Copia would not exist. That day I fed one man. Because of his story, Copia will feed 8 million people” this year.

Yet the journey from one to 8 million was anything but linear.

Ahmad’s first attempt to find new stomachs for 500 leftover sandwiches on short notice had hardly any takers. Fast forward to subsequent efforts where she recruited her own volunteer drivers to ferry food from A to B, then tapped into the existing infrastructure of Doordash and Postmates to scale her endeavor. But after three years, Copia had yet to make much of a splash locally, and Ahmad felt depleted. “I lost my passion,” she said. “I lost my fire.” 

She took a job at Google, listening to the complaints of angry customers for six months before getting fired. She had hit “rock bottom.” 

But her dismissal was the “best thing that ever happened to me.” The intensity of failure, she told students, provides one with a new clarity, allows one’s strengths to shine through, and one’s “genuine self emerges.”

Ahmad returned to her passion, first volunteering at a Silicon Valley food pantry and then recruiting more volunteers. She built the technology and logistical systems to connect all manner of businesses and nonprofits so that leftover meals can find recipients who need them now. Copia joined the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator and became a multimillion-dollar startup.

“It’s not an overnight transformation,” she said. “It’s taking this step over and over — to take the risk, chase the dream, and follow your heart.”

“Whatever comes your way,” she advised, “keep moving forward.”

That, in a nutshell, is one of the key attributes of a successful entrepreneur, and a life view that UC Berkeley inspires, teaches, and supports. So remember to get your Big Ideas proposal in by December 6 — take a cue from Komal and take that risk. We are here to support you!

By K.J. Bannan

By Alisha Dalvi

When we think about our socio-economic future, endless possibilities come to mind. You may be concerned about the changing climate or advancements in technology or how various social groups interact with each other. Or maybe you’re thinking on a smaller scale, interested in how your community will be affected. Ilana Lipsett explores all of these facets. As a senior program manager at Institute for the Future, a non-profit encouraging individuals and organizations to plan for the long-term, Lipsett looks at the world-to-come through a collaborative lens. But her dedication to innovative futures transcends her office. As a judge and mentor of the Big Ideas Contest, housed at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, Lipsett has become a key piece of the program and an exemplar for students who too hope to redesign how we approach forthcoming generations.     

Lipsett is a Bay Area native, born and raised in the East Bay, and frequented UC Berkeley for summer school growing up. She attended college across the state at UC San Diego, studying History, French Literature, and Music. Her unique educational focuses led her down a long and windy road of various disciplines: She started off in Washington, D.C. at the intersection of labor and politics, working on everything from political campaigns to advocacy work for displaced workers. Ten years later, she returned to the Bay Area to get her M.B.A. in Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School. During and after grad school, Lipsett worked for the City of San Francisco at the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. This kickstarted her work in urban development with an emphasis in community engagement; her advocacy for creating accessible and inclusive public spaces and public-facing activities translated across different domains: from the City of San Francisco, to a private real estate developer, to her own business, and even at an international scale, supporting community spaces in refugee camps. 

Now, Lipsett advances her brand of public engagement and participatory design at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Her work has a civic-futures focus, entwining sustainable community solutions into everything from political systems to real estate. One of her many ongoing projects works to expand a predominantly POC housing co-op in San Francisco by creating an accessible STEM center and Performing Arts Center in unoccupied buildings. But Lipsett also values impact through education. At IFTF, Lipsett teaches public classes to an international audience on design futures and foresight essentials. “I really want to give people the tools to think about how the future can be different,” she says. “Then encourage them to get creative and make the changes so they can move towards their preferred future.” Lipsett certainly practices what she preaches: As a singer and songwriter for “The Seastars,” a girl band that uses music to advocate for a climate sustainable future, Lipsett taps into her creative side to encourage others to change their behavior in favor of our environment.

When she is not busy changing the future and using music to empower the world, Lipsett carries teams to victory in the annual Big Ideas competition. Lipsett first heard about Big Ideas in 2018 through her friend, Dani Bicknell, a program manager for Big Ideas at the time. Bicknell told her about the competition and asked if she wanted to be a part of it. “I always love to be involved in the local community, but Big Ideas especially felt like a great fit with the skills I have to offer and how I want to be connecting with others,” Lipsett says. So, on whim, she said yes, but just as a one-time commitment. But that one time, where she served as both a judge and a mentor to a team, was such an incredible experience that she immediately knew that it wouldn’t be her last. “It was such an amazing opportunity to see students see potential in something new,” she says. 

As a judge, Lipsett reads and judges student entrants’ social innovations’ pre-proposals based on a specific scorecard, deciding whether it should move on to the final round. There are four factors on which pre-proposals are measured: viability, originality, team, and quality. “Saying no is probably the hardest part,” she admits. “Every proposal is so interesting and creative.” After the finalists have been determined, Lipsett is matched with a team of students to act as their mentor. Lipsett highlights how perfectly aligned she was with teams she was matched with. For example, one project she mentored, Doin’ Good, aimed to provide vocational education to Syrian refugees in Lebanon by creating mobile maker spaces and education centers out of a van. Conveniently, Lipsett had just come back from Bangladesh, creating maker spaces at refugee camps there. And Lipsett’s expertise certainly paid off — Doin’ Good won first in the Workforce Development track in 2019 and was a Grand Prize finalist! 

As a mentor, Lipsett meets with her mentees every week, setting a timeline of work to be done and anticipating and preemptively addressing potential challenges or gaps. From providing connections to people working in the field to helping with the budget, Lipsett was the go-to person whenever her team was stuck. But Lipsett believes it’s the students’ drive that allows the project to flourish. One team Lipsett mentored, Send Help, proposed an AI chatbot that connects citizens with police alternatives during non-emergencies. Essentially, they wanted to make calling non-police first responders as easy as calling 911. Lipsett suggested to the team that the proposal needed an endorsement from public officials, and the next thing she knew, the team had met with the Berkeley City Council and got letters of approval from policymakers. 

Lipsett is certainly not short of accolades in her own endeavors for innovative change. In 2013, the White House awarded the Champion of Change Award to her and her team for creating [freespace], a movement dedicated to activating vacant spaces as temporary community, cultural, and art hubs. [freespace] (written with the brackets) was part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, created by the Obama White House, encouraging everyday citizens to get involved in addressing civic issues in their neighborhood. Lipsett, with her team, came up with an idea: “What if we create a community space as a platform instead of focusing on one specific issue?” So, they found a 14,000-square-foot warehouse on the market for $25,000 a month and convinced the landlord to rent it to them for $1. This was the birth of [freespace]. The project had two rules: everything had to be free, and everything had to be participatory. 

“It opened up as an experiment, we didn’t have goals or expectations, we didn’t know where it would go,” Lipsett recalls. But the success was hard to believe. “People would come for one thing and stay for another.” There were paella cooking lessons while artists were making sculptures during a class for programming LED Lights. At one workshop, facilitators encouraged kids from the local Boys and Girls Club to create their own superheroes. Then, costume designers turned their visions into reality, working with the kids to create personalized superhero costumes. This likely would not have happened if not for the random human collision which [freespace] cultivated; the workshop idea came to the costume designers after spending time in [freespace], often surrounded by children. Seeing the benefits of giving the community a space with an open invitation to do and create anything inspired a whole [freespace] movement: While the space in San Francisco was always meant to be temporary, 26 different locations opened across 18 countries around the world. 

This year, Lipsett mentored yet another Big Ideas team. She values investing time to enhance and encourage students’ social innovations. And while she has decades of experience and serves as a mentor, Lipsett still feels she has a lot to learn from others, whether it’s kids with superhero dreams or grad students providing safer alternatives to police calls. “Working with such determined students is so energizing, the whole process is definitely mutually beneficial,” she says. 

By Lisa Bauer

Nearly a decade ago, more than 80 global organizations came together to sign the London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases, to control, eliminate, or eradicate at least ten of the diseases by 2020. Progress has been made on “NTDs” (neglected tropical diseases), but they still affect nearly one billion people, reinforcing poverty in low-resource regions.

UC Berkeley Professor of Bioengineering Dan Fletcher has been working to accelerate NTD diagnosis and treatment with a device so ubiquitous it’s probably in your hand: a smartphone. Fletcher, with a group of interdisciplinary scientists from in and outside his lab, have steadily proved that smartphone cameras can be repurposed as microscopes to identify disease-causing pathogens, such as the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and the parasites that cause River Blindness.

“Phones have enormous imaging and processing capabilities,” explained Fletcher at a recent faculty salon of the Blum Center, where he serves as chief technologist. “Our work has been to harness these consumer electronics to do the complex imaging and image interpretation tasks. We add lenses and automation to the mobile devices; then we capture, geotag and upload the image data we collect, giving us greater information about the spread of disease.”

By removing the need for a laboratory and highly trained technicians to perform image-based processing, the Fletcher Lab’s CellScope, as the family of devices is called, can dramatically expedite NTD treatment by enabling patients to receive rapid, low-cost, and highly accurate diagnoses, even in remote regions. Fletcher and others believe the device has enormous potential to contribute to NTD elimination efforts, because while the drugs to treat NTDs already exist–an efficient, systematic, and affordable diagnosis and treatment method does not.

“Thanks to the London Declaration, major pharmaceutical companies have pledged to contribute the drugs needed to treat many NTDs,” said Fletcher. “CellScope will help us tackle the missing ingredient: the way to identify those in need. For effective treatment and monitoring, we must know who’s infected, where they are, and whether there is reemergence. That’s where technology comes in.”

The latest version of CellScope, called LoaScope, has proven effective in Cameroon, where it is being used to combat a NTD called River Blindness or Onchoceriasis. Endemic in Sub-Saharan Africa, Onchoceriasis is a severely debilitating disease that results in human blindness. Although the antiparasitic drug, Ivermectin, is readily available, treatment via mass drug administration has been halted in some regions due to serious adverse effects caused by co-infection with a worm call Loa loa. Treatment in Loa-endemic regions is complex because if Ivermectin is administered to someone who is simultaneously infected with Loa Loa, the drug can lead to fatal complications.

To safely relaunch mass drug administration of Ivermectin, Fletcher and a team of medical professionals from NIH in the U.S., IRD in France, and CRFilMT in Cameroon launched a pilot project in Okola District of Cameroon, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Local healthcare workers collected small blood samples from patients and inserted them into the LoaScope to measure the number of parasites; if the number was below a certain safety threshold, then the patient was treated with Ivermectin. Patients with parasite loads above a certain threshold did not receive Ivermectin to reduce the possibility of complications from treatment.

With this approach, 96 percent of the 16,000 people examined in the Okola District pilot study had Loa loa levels below the safety threshold and were treated for River Blindness, while only 2 percent had to be excluded because of Loa loa levels that put them at risk of complications from treatment (the remaining 2 percent could not receive Ivermectin for other reasons such as pregnancy or illness). Findings from the Cameroon pilot were published in 2017 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Cameroon Ministry of Health approved the study and backed the use of the LoaScope technology to restart mass administration of Ivermectin for control of River Blindness. Prior to the pilot study, a public health education campaign to encourage citizens to seek safe diagnosis with LoaScope was carried out–including public testing of the Minister of Health with the LoaScope.

Although the Cameroon pilot was a success, the next challenge is scaling the technology so that the millions of people living in Loa-endemic regions can benefit from safe treatment of River Blindness with ivermectin.

“The problem is no longer that we don’t have the tools. We now do,” said Fletcher. “The problem right now is the funding, manufacturing, and distribution gap–how do we best scale this device and get it to the people who need it?”

Funds are needed to mass produce the device, establish a support infrastructure, and develop an IT system. Yet the cost benefits could be significant. For example, currently the cost of a single capillary for the LoaScope is $2; if the process was automated, the cost would decrease to just 30 cents. A similar reduction in cost of the device is possible.

In addition to River Blindness, the Fletcher Lab has identified five other NTDs for which CellScope could be applied. Schistosomiasis is the next disease the lab hopes to test and treat. Like River Blindness, schistosomiasis is a worm-based disease, but the parasites that cause it are detected in urine or stool samples. Thus, instead of taking a blood sample, CellScope would be adapted to analyze filtered urine and stool that is loaded into the same capillary and imaged with the same device.

“The basic technology–a mobile microscope with image processing capabilities–is already there, and with a few modifications we can adapt it to new diseases,” said Fletcher. “Increasing access to high-quality disease diagnosis is beginning to be within reach for low-resource settings with technologies such as these. But the same challenge remains: scaling.”

The Lemelson Foundation, the world’s leading funder of invention in service of social and economic change, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies are embarking on a yearlong collaboration to enable students participating in the University of California Big Ideas Contest to increase their expertise in developing environmentally responsible inventions and innovations. The initiative exposes students to sustainable practices with the goal of increasing awareness around environmental impact throughout the invention and business model development process–from the materials used to the end of lifecycle implications.

The partnership between The Lemelson Foundation and the Blum Center will enhance the importance of environmental responsibility in the Big Ideas Contest, with special emphasis on the Hardware for Good category. Additionally, there will be an increased focus on engaging students from low-income and underserved backgrounds to participate in the contest.

Since 2006, the Blum Center has hosted the Big Ideas student innovation prize, to provide mentorship, training, and resources for budding social entrepreneurs across the University of California system. Hardware for Good encompasses everything from wearable and assistive technologies and devices to improve agricultural productivity to smart home systems that improve energy efficiency and safety. The 2017-2018 winner in the Hardware for Good category was Innovis Medical, a blood clotting prevention device for civilian and military trauma care that is being tested on cardiac patients at UC Davis Medical with the aim of FDA approval by 2021.

Said Phillip Denny, director of Big Ideas: “Since 2006, over 6,000 students from more than 100 majors have participated in the Big Ideas Contest, raising more than $2.4 million in seed funding that has been invested across 450 ventures. In this age of climate change and resource constraints, we need more students focused on planet-saving big ideas. We are thus immensely grateful to The Lemelson Foundation for making environmental responsibility an explicit element of the competition and for strengthening our outreach to low-income and first-generation college students. Diversity in innovators leads to diversity of innovations.”

With support from The Lemelson Foundation, Big Ideas 2018-2019 activities will include educational programs coupled with outreach to keep environmental responsibility top-of-mind as student inventors and innovators design new devices and ventures. Judging criteria will also be modified to reflect greater emphasis on environmental impact. Among the student education programs will be the “Inventing Green” workshop on October 22 to raise awareness and understanding of environmental responsibility in innovation and entrepreneurship among the University of California’s 240,000 undergraduate and graduate students and participating students from Makerere University in Uganda and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Lemelson Foundation funding will also support Blum Center practitioners-in-residence who will provide environmentally responsible design expertise to Big Ideas student teams and their projects.

“Students have the passion and drive to make the world better through inventions and entrepreneurship, and the Big Ideas program will better prepare them to ensure the solutions of today don’t become the problems of tomorrow,” said Cindy Cooper, program officer for The Lemelson Foundation. “Thinking holistically about environmental impact early on can also lead to more creative product ideas and put startups on a path to being more competitive and resilient as they grow to scale. We’re excited to see what students come up with.”

UC Berkeley changemakers built a cellphone-turned-microscope that detects parasites in the blood in just 30 seconds—without expensive equipment, a lab, or a clinic. Reporter Laura Ling meets with the team to discuss how the innovation could revolutionize the field of public health. Watch here.