Looming in the minds of several Cornell University students is the opportunity of a $1 million prize. They’ll have to work hard to claim the money.
On Dec. 3, Li, Rohan Patel and Shen Lee strategized their concept for the Hult Prize in the University's eHub, a space dedicated to entrepreneurship.
“The Hult Prize is an organization that empowers students through social entrepreneurship to change the world,” said Samantha Kirsch ’18, president of Hult Prize @Cornell.
The global competition was called “the Nobel prize for students” by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus; he won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for starting the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which aimed to “help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves,” according to his Nobel Prize biography.
Both undergraduate and graduate students are eligible to design an idea that answers a different question each year. The winner earns $1 million in seed capital to implement their idea.
This year’s challenge is: “Can you build a scalable, sustainable social enterprise that harnesses the power of energy to transform the lives of 10 million people by 2025?”
Li and Patel study electrical engineering, while Lee is pursuing a degree in business. They hope that their combined skills can create a winning team. As you might expect, they didn’t want to share too much about their idea, as the competition is still in its early stages.
“So what we want to do is build a platform, a system that allows for renewables to enter the grid, that allows for renewables to be traded easily and allows people to become more independent in how they get their energy,” Li said.
With the exception of a deadline, the challenge may sound quite ambiguous. Hirsch says that’s the whole point.
“The challenge in 2018, the prompt is extremely vague in the sense that it really encourages students to tackle the issue from all different angles and see how their ideas really blossom with that openness,” Kirsch said.
For example, the 2014 challenge centered around fixing chronic illness in slums around the world. Again, groups are left to interpretation.
A collection from the University of Pennsylvania found themselves focused on the problem of tooth decay.
“So what’s our solution to this widespread, severe disease?” a competitor from Sweet Bites asked the audience at the final round of presentation. “Chewing gum. And not just any type of chewing gum; chewing gum that helps fight cavities with the help of the all-natural sweetener xylitol.” (watch the video of Sweet Bites’ presentation below)
Patel said this year’s goal is to help people gain access to new energy technologies.
“It’s also to have access to renewable energy,” Patel said. “So, it’s stability to bring those into the markets because a lot of things are preventing them from being able to become sustainable right now.”
The 2018 Hult Prize has yet to fully begin. Teams at Cornell will pitch their ideas later this month.
The winner will be eligible to compete against other Ivy League schools or in general regional finals in March 2018. From there, 50 winners move on to the Hult Prize Accelerator for an eight-week period next summer to work on their designs.
The Global Final is December of 2018.