Six business students from York University’s Schulich School of Business are among six teams from four countries competing for the Hult Prize global case challenge for social enterprise startups, valued at $1 million (US). This is the second year in a row a Canadian team has advanced to the finals, The Globe and Mail reports.
The prize "challenges business students to devise affordable solutions to global problems, put its spotlight this year on the issue of non-communicable chronic diseases in urban slums," the article reports. "For example, according to Hult prize organizers, an estimated 74 million slum-dwellers suffer from diabetes that goes mostly untreated and, as a result, leads to early mortality."
The Schulich students pitched the idea of REACH Diagnostics "to develop a patent-pending detection test for diabetes that can be produced on an ordinary printer for two cents," according to a press release from Schulich.
For placing first regionally, the team won a two-month stay at the Hult Prize Accelerator in Boston, which incubates social entrepreneurship startups, as well as a one-year membership in the Clinton Global Initiative, which was established by former U.S. president Bill Clinton in 2005.
The York students will compete against two teams from the United States and one each from France, India and Spain.
McGill students took home the prize last year for "a project that promotes cricket farming as a low-cost source of nutrition in poor countries," the Globe and Mail reports.
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Original Source: The Globe and Mail