UMass Amherst Hosts International Social Impact Startup Competition

On April 23, UMass Amherst hosted a final regional summit in this year’s $1 million Hult Foundation startup competition. Now in its twelfth year, the international competition challenges student entrepreneurs to solve social issues such as food security (the theme of this year’s 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 fifty 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 thirty proposed judges from which the Center chose twelve—more than half with Berthiaume affiliations, and the others through Hult connections. 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 (pictured left) about food entrepreneurship and a keynote speech by Fatimah Baeshen, a 2002 UMass Amherst sociology graduate who is founder of an international affairs advisory firm called Quantum and AuthenticFi, a creative platform.

 

As an accelerator for student enterprises devoted to social impact problem solving, Hult is perennially ranked number one in the world by Unikorn, a news media company focused on accomplishments by students. 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, 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, thirty-five teams from thirty universities and eleven countries competed for the regional title. The judges included a mix of fourteen 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 takes place at the U.N. in the fall.

 

“Hult is above all about student growth,” Thomas says. “It helps UMass and Berthiaume to expand our horizons—to get them thinking about how they can change the world through their own ventures.”