For the startups pitching in the Harvard President's Innovation Challenge (PIC) this year, the path to pitch night was unlike any other.
In mid-March, Harvard University had just told its students not to come back after spring break, with the intention of transitioning all classes to remote learning by the end of the month. The i-lab followed suit: That week, leaders said all its programming workshops and meetings would be held virtually, and team members could only come into the coworking space for “essential business purposes.”
In other words, the i-lab went completely virtual.
Matt Segneri, who took over as i-lab’s new executive director on March 9—the same week Harvard made the decision to go remote—scaled up one-on-one conversations and office hours in an effort to ensure that startups would still have access to the same resources they would in the lab in Allston.
“The i-lab has always been more than a physical space,” Segneri said in an interview with BostInno last month. “The community transcends the campus.”
This year, the PIC had five main tracks. In each track, $75,000 was awarded to the grand prize winner, and $25,000 went to the runner-up. The PIC also had what it calls "Ingenuity Awards" for students who have a compelling idea but not a fully formed venture (yet). One winner received $5,000, and two runners-up won $2,500 each.
"Tonight looks a lot different from the 1,000-person event at Kleiman Hall last spring," Segneri said in opening remarks in a livestream on Harvard's website Thursday evening. "Tonight is a true experiment for us, but being resourceful is exactly what innovators have to do when the unexpected happens."
Segneri noted that the livestream actually made the PIC more accessible, allowing potentially thousands to tune in remotely wearing "business-formal sweatpants" from their homes, he quipped.
"Innovation has never been more important, and the entrepreneurial spirit these teams embody is essential to our navigating out of these trying times," Segneri said.
Below are this year's winners. Descriptions provided by Harvard i-lab.
Health & Life Sciences track
$75K grand prize Umbulizer: Developing a reliable, low-cost, and portable device that can provide continuous ventilation to patients. $25K runner-up Concerto Biosciences: Discovering functional microbial communities for human therapeutics using a patented, high-throughput screening platform.
Social Impact or Cultural Enterprise track
$75K grand prize Coding it Forward: A 501(c)(3) nonprofit empowering the next generation of technology leaders to create social change. $25K runner-up Change the Tune: The Studio: An innovative and accessible summer program model providing impactful learning opportunities for youth and innovators.
Open track
$75K grand prize Fractal: Streaming GPU-powered Windows 10 desktops to any macOS or Windows device. $25K runner-up Tang: A mobile app allowing Filipino overseas workers to send money home and allowing the receiver to use the same app to e-pay.
Launch Lab X (alumni-founded ventures)
$75K grand prize Vincere Health: Using real-time incentives and behavioral nudges to motivate people to live healthier lives. $25K runner-up OZÉ: A platform connecting small business owners in Africa to data, cash, clients and each other.
Life Lab
$75K grand prize Tectonic Therapeutic: Transforming the discovery of novel drugs addressing targets in the G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) family. $25K runner-up Day Zero Diagnostics: Combining genome sequencing and machine learning to modernize infectious disease diagnosis and treatment.
Ingenuity Awards ($10K)
This year’s Ingenuity Grand Prize winner was Foresight for empowering people with vision impairments with a novel wearable navigation device using soft actuators and computer vision. The two runners-up were 1,000 More, for facilitating crowd-funding lobbying efforts so that average Americans have access to that part of our democracy, and Datacule, for developing molecular data storage technology.
