Innovation Amid Unrest: Celebrating Student Ventures at Harvard Amid Campus Protests
On May Day (this past Wednesday), I was at Harvard Business School attending the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge awards. It felt a bit surreal as this coincided with protest on Harvard’s and other campuses, and Columbia University's quiet aftermath following the forced removal of student protesters from the quad—a stretch of grass I once walked across as a student, and where today classes and college administration were disrupted.
As Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, and many other schools navigate this wave of protests, it was reassuring and uplifting to see these inventive student-led ventures innovating in the social, health, life, and community domains. There were 25 finalist pitches from a wide variety of ventures. A total of $515,000 in funding, courtesy of the Bertarelli Foundation, was shared among this year's finalists.
Alan Garber, Harvard's interim president, was on hand to present the cash prizes and trophies, along with Matt Segneri, the Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Executive Director of the Harvard Innovation Labs – which includes the Student i-lab, Alumni Launch Lab, and Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab. Alan, Matt, and the entire Klarman Hall audience showered the student finalists with abundant support and enthusiasm and privately expressed great encouragement. It was a warm and wonderful event.
The student ventures (163 semifinalists) competed in the following categories:
Social impact
Health and life sciences
An open track, and
Student Ingenuity Awards
Alumni and affiliates competed in health and life sciences and the open category. In addition to Harvard College and Harvard Business School, founding teams came from the Harvard Extension School, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. A total of 13 schools. I think that’s amazing array of schools producing ventures to the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The 3 companies that I liked the most were:
MicroAvionics: This venture is building ultra-lightweight atmospheric sensing devices without any moving parts that can self-levitate indefinitely into Earth’s and Mars’s atmospheres. These devices do not need fuel or batteries as they explore the atmospheres of these planets and try to analyze environmental, climate, and other challenges.
MabLab: Building five-in-one test strips to detect the five deadliest lacing agents – such as xylazine – in your stash of recreational drugs to reduce drug overdose deaths. ($25,000 President’s Innovation Award Winners)
Somite (my favorite): Leveraging AI – specifically an OpenAI ChatGPT LLM – to develop novel cell therapies for diabetes, obesity, and muscular dystrophies. The founding team has a big vision and an amazing background, complete with the right experience.
Read about the ventures and winners here: https://innovationlabs.harvard.edu/pic/pic-2024/ventures.
Clearly, the Harvard iLab excelled in mentoring and preparing ventures, organizing this event with flawless execution, which highlighted the undeniable strength of Harvard's robust entrepreneurial ecosystem. This event also offered a welcome respite from the other events unfolding in the world today.