Prakhar Singhania, an undergraduate exchange student from India studying supply chain, food science and material science, stood at the lectern and spoke quickly, outlining a scenario that seemed far from the third-floor conference room of eHub on Oct. 22.
In rural India, 40% of fruits and vegetables are wasted before they ever reach consumers' plates, primarily due to inadequate cold storage facilities. Instead of reaching the marketplace, produce often withers in the field in that subtropical climate. His big idea: Developing an off-grid, electricity-free and battery-free cold storage system specifically designed for Indian farmers. It would minimize food waste and also allow farmers to sell their wares more consistently when it was financially advantageous.
Audience questions were pointed and swift, some from the panel of judges in the front row, some from fellow students and participants in this year's BIG Idea Competition at Cornell.
Designed to provide undergrad students with early-stage ideas the opportunity to compete for cash prizes, the competition also enables participants to gain access to the Blackstone LaunchPad program, the signature program of the Blackstone Charitable Foundation aimed at providing mentorship and venture-creation support for students, alumni, faculty and staff at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey.
Post-harvest cooling of fruits and vegetables is vital to increase shelf life, Singhania said. Yet in India less than 20% of food produced moves through the cold chain. His project, called Cold Bank, aimed to reduce the temperature by 30 to 40% without the use of electricity.
His descriptions of both problem and solution earned Cold Bank the evening's top prize of $3,000.
In all, the eight competing teams received $9,000 in prize money to take their ideas to the next stage of implementation. The teams, chosen from a pool of 142 submissions, presented solutions to problems ranging from hyper-specific and personal to global, with just five minutes to pitch and three minutes for questions and answers. While a few of those present were members of Cornell's Epsilon Nu Tau entrepreneurship club, others were novice entrepreneurs, in keeping with Blackstone LaunchPad's goal of broadening accessibility and focusing on recruiting underrepresented and under-resourced students.
"The BIG Idea Competition at Cornell encourages budding entrepreneurs to view entrepreneurship as an exciting, fulfilling and challenging career path," said Nancy Almann '83, co-managing director of Blackstone Launchpad."Felix Litvinsky and I are here to support these students - and any student with their own big idea - as they build their startups. It's motivating, inspiring and uplifting to work with these focused, dedicated students."
Trisha Beher '25, an applied economics and management major in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business introduced Klumi, her vision for a customizable and sustainable razor brand for women.
"Unlike other razors where hair gets trapped behind the blades," said Beher, founder of Women Leaders of Color at Cornell and the Art Shine Foundation, "ours can be taken out, cleaned and locked back into place, meaning the razors won't just last a few months - they will last years."
Alana Berry '25, an architecture student minoring in engineering for sustainable energy systems, pitched Living Human Systems, an AI-driven 3D biomimetic urban modeling software that, she said, could transform urban planning.
She pointed to New York City's futile efforts to reduce emissions and to mitigate flooding risks - "too many data gaps," she said. By inputting biological systems, including cellular networks, tissue structures and organ dynamics, AI would learn to "interpret complex spatial patterns and using graph neural networks to simulate how resources move through interconnected systems," she said. She envisioned this as a way to create a cohesive, living urban system using existing urban data as a base.
Judges Christa Downey, director of the Engineering Career Center; Abigail Christman, assistant director at the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise; Lilly Jan, food and beverage management lecturer in the SC Johnson College; entrepreneur Jim Colburn '81; and Albert Charles, an MBA student in the in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, awarded Berry second place in the competition and $2,000.
Berry spoke of her project's goal of optimizing older ecosystems, essentially re-envisioning the world that is already here. This was a throughline with many of the teams' projects: how to employ new and emerging technologies to solve age-old questions of resource allocation, disconnectedness and inefficiencies.
"It's about innovation, not invention, about integrating things in impactful ways," she said.
