A team of Mexican entrepreneurs were the winners of the 2019 Diego Sandoval with his mentor Ahmad Ashkar at Boston Regional, 2017. (Courtesy – Diego Sandoval)”That led to a series of internships with the Hult Prize accelerator program, where the best 50 teams get together over six weeks to compete and build their businesses,” he said.”The accelerator program brings in 200 students from around the world from over 30 countries,” Sandoval said. “And I had the privilege of sitting down with every participant, every competitor, to study the social networks behind their business growth. And so as part of the Social Research branch of network science, I was able to investigate that social capital that we have embedded in the Hult Prize ecosystem.”The experience gave him the opportunity to understand the message of what the Hult Prize stands for he said. “It really aims to inspire students to change the trajectory of their careers from a traditional, conventional path to a more entrepreneurial and more passion-driven, mission-driven career.”Winners circlePrevious Hult Prize winners have included people like Mohammed Ashour, co-founder and CEO of the Aspire Food Group, which harvests crickets as a source of protein to feed the world.And a winning start-up team from India called NanoHealth, devoted to bringing health care to India’s urban slums.”We have companies in agriculture, in fishing, in youth unemployment, from Palestine to Zimbabwe,” Ashkar, of the Hult Foundation, said. “We’ve got over 25,000 students who organize programs across a hundred countries and 2,500 staff and volunteers.”It’s just been a humbling experience to build this movement,” he said.Hult Prize 2020The theme for the 2020 Hult Prize is the issue of climate change.For would-be contestants, Rutopia’s Iturriaga offered advice: “The important thing is that you really care about the problem. You don’t build a business and then make the impact, you first see what’s your passion, what do you want to solve in the world, and then you build a business around it.”Tina Trinh contributed to this report from New York City.
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