Student Innovators

International Social Impact Startup Contest Comes to UMass

On April 23, UMass Amherst hosted a final regional summit in the 2021 $1 million Hult Foundation startup competition.The international competition challenges student entrepreneurs to solve social issues, such as food security (the theme of the 2021 challenge), water access, energy, education, and other priorities.

Earning the honor of serving as regional finals host was no mean feat: UMass was one of only two U.S. sites in that role. The contest, notes Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship Executive Director Gregory Thomas, is anything but U.S.-centric, with 50 regional summits around the globe. To secure its distinction as a regional summit site, Berthiaume submitted a detailed proposal in December 2020. The plan included a list of 30 proposed judges from which the Hult organization chose 12. In the plan, Berthiaume also committed to publicizing the event through social media and inviting an audience to its concluding gathering. Berthiaume’s student assistants, MBA Fellows, and student volunteers worked closely with Hult Prize staff to create the entirely remote program, which included panel discussions about food entrepreneurship and a keynote speech by UMass Amherst sociology graduate Fatimah Baeshen ’02, who is founder of an international affairs advisory firm called Quantum, and AuthenticFi, a creative platform.

Hult, which was founded in 2009 by social entrepreneur Ahmad Ashkar, has catalyzed initiatives by 25,000 students at 2,000-plus universities in more than 100 countries. It is an official global partner of the United Nations. Thomas credits UMass and Berthiaume’s long-standing relationship with Hult as a key factor in the choice of the campus as a regional finals site. “For at least five years running, Berthiaume has hosted local Hult challenges,” observes Thomas. “We’ve also sent students to regionals in Boston and Toronto. And in the past two years, our students have worked directly with the Hult organization on competitions.”

In November 2021, Qualtags (then called Ripe) won the local campus Hult competition. The venture of three Isenberg students—Harsha Prakki (OIM), Satish Pokuri (OIM, economics), and Dev Parikh (finance, economics)—Qualtags is developing a sticker that changes color when food is exposed to damaging temperatures. The fall win punched their ticket to the April regional finals at UMass. “The competitive process has added immeasurably to our enterprise,” says Prakki. “Hult offers all sorts of resources. The process has made us stronger. We’ve all grown tremendously.”

At the event, 35 teams from 30 universities and 11 countries competed for the regional title. The judges included a mix of 14 entrepreneurs, financiers, and representatives from universities, NGOs, chambers of commerce, and others. The two winners were a University of California Berkeley team called Impact Food, which is developing plant-based seafood substitutes, and a University of Rochester team called Advanced Growing Resources that is making portable sensors to allow farmers to detect plant diseases early in the field. Both teams qualified along with the winners from each of the 50 global regional finals competitions for Hult’s four-week accelerator in August, notes Thomas. The final competition took place at the U.N. in the fall.

The UMass Amherst campus sponsors a large annual student-organized event called HackUMass. The 36-hour event brings together as many as 1,000 students— including those from non-tech majors— from around the country to work on hardware and software projects in the Integrative Learning Center.

The first all-women and nonbinary student hackathon in western Massachusetts, HackHer413, which takes place annually, is a student-organized and run event that welcomes 350 participants from New England and beyond. The principal goals of the event are to create a welcoming hacking environment, celebrate first-time hackers, and encourage women from any major or career interest to explore computer science.

Seasoned student entrepreneurs and inexperienced idea-holders both fit into the UMass Entrepreneurship Club perfectly. Catering to many skill levels, the club is developing spaces for both first-timers and 'old'-timers to learn and problem-solve. New this year, the club joined forces with the Social Entrepreneurship program to foster a larger audience and generate an even greater impact. In addition to its biannual startup event, ULaunch, which has created more than 50 student-run startups, the club is looking to plan a trip to Boston in the spring and aims to bring back a sense of the bustling startup scene to UMass. Lastly, the Entrepreneurship Club is teaming up with the Women of Isenberg organization for an event to help motivated women learn new skills and pursue their dreams.

The UMass Amherst Three Minute Thesis (3MT) celebrates the research accomplishments of the university’s graduate students while helping them develop their presentation and communication skills. These popular competitions have become a global phenomenon and offer graduate students the opportunity to communicate the significance of their research to a general audience—all in three minutes or less. The first-place winner of the 2021 contest, Adam Netzer Zimmer (pictured above), presented his doctoral research in anthropology on the historical sourcing of cadavers for medical research from marginalized populations. In a three-minute video, he explained that, before the current practice of voluntary body donation, cadavers were taken from poor families in New York City and from Aboriginal burial grounds in Australia. The identities of many bodies still being used for medical research remain unknown.