A team from National Taiwan University (NTU) is in the UK with 30 teams from around the world to compete in this year’s Hult Prize Challenge, with the top prize being a US$1 million start-up fund.
NTU’s “interWellness” team — consisting of students Joyce Chen (陳敏而), Sandy Tsai (蔡岑珊) and Lin Fang-ju (林芳如) — won a regional challenge in April to represent Taiwan at the competition.
The Hult Prize Challenge is an annual competition that crowd-sources ideas from university students to solve a pressing social issue.
Photo courtesy of Joyce Chen
With the theme of “Food for Good,” the goal of this year’s challenge is to create jobs, stimulate economies, reimagine supply chains and improve outcomes for 10 million people by 2030, the organizers said.
The team is using the challenge as an important learning opportunity and a chance to do things that are “meaningful and impactful” for the world, said Chen, a second-generation Taiwanese-American.
Chen said that interWellness is a platform that enlists the help of nutritionists and chefs to offer diet-friendly meals to people with chronic kidney disease.
After repeatedly updating their business model, the team registered interWellness as a company in Taipei and opened for business a week ago, Chen added.
The team is one of 30 that qualified to participate in the Hult Prize this year after 30,000 teams participated in the preliminary round.
The 30 teams are in the UK, participating in a five-week global accelerator program. At the end, only six teams will move on to the finals, with the winning team to receive US$1 million in seed capital next month.
During the accelerator program, the 30 teams are being housed at an English castle, Chen said.
As well as preparing for the challenge, the team has made trademark Taiwanese snacks — pineapple cakes and cream puffs — to give to the other teams and promote Taiwanese culture, she said.
Chen said that her Taiwanese parents raised her in Fremont, California, but that she came to Taiwan to study at NTU four years ago.
The decision was “one of the best decisions I ever made,” she said, adding that it also improved her Chinese-language skills.
“Now I can read books in Chinese, and be closer to my friends and relatives in Taiwan,” she said.
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