Entrepreneurship

Corporate-funded academic inventions spur increased innovation, analysis says

03/19/14 — Academic research sponsored by industry has a strong track record of leading to innovative patents and licenses, challenging assumptions that corporate support skews science toward inventions that are less accessible and less useful to others than those funded by the government or non-profit organizations, according to a new analysis.

Chris Ategeka named to Forbes 30 Under 30

01/08/14 Forbes — Christopher Ategeka (B.S. '11 ME), founder of CA Bikes, which builds bike and motorcycle ambulances for those in need in his native Uganda, has been selected as one of Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs.

VIRES Engineering: Revolutionizing power of all kinds

01/06/14 Inc. — VIRES Engineering, a startup founded by a slew of undergraduate Berkeley engineers, mathematicians and business majors, already has four products in the works: a high-efficiency transmission, a plastics recycling machine, a novel drone wing design, and a high-power, low-cost wind turbine. "It's like a think tank of engineers," says co-founder Jordan Greene of the company, which has been named one of America's coolest college startups by Inc. magazine.

Do-it-yourself cellular coverage for remote places

12/12/13 MIT Technology Review — With Swedish telephone numbers, a tree-bound base station, and help from a team of Berkeley engineers, a remote Indonesian village is running its own telecommunications company.

People’s choice

11/01/13 — In the age of the Internet and social media, old investing models may be giving way to newer models, such as crowdfunding.

Student entrepreneurship is humming at elite universities

05/14/13 Forbes — “I am young, have time and am willing to take the risk. We want to innovate and deliver awesome engineering products,” says mechanical engineering major Timothy Lee in a story examining the passion of student entrepreneurs and UC Berkeley's expanding efforts to nurture them.

No idle hands

03/05/13 — Alum Christian Fernandez says he was never a poster-boy student. Now, almost a decade after leaving campus, he is having a run of successful ventures. The computer programmer-turned-entrepreneur is juggling a couple of up-and-coming projects: a collaborative tech space, Ace Monster Toys, in West Oakland, and Hackbright Academy, a training ground for female programmers.

SkyDeck wins Catalyst Award

02/15/13 Haas Newsroom — SkyDeck, the UC Berkeley startup accelerator in downtown Berkeley, won the Catalyst Award at the first-ever East Bay Innovation Awards celebration. The year-old SkyDeck is a collaboration between the College of Engineering, the Haas School of Business, and the Vice Chancellor for Research Office.

New program to explore ‘crowdfunding,’ other innovations in entrepreneurial finance

11/21/12 MarketWatch — The Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership has launched a program for innovation in entrepreneurial and social finance that aims to explain the new phenomenon of "crowdfunding" and identify best practices in micro-, mobile- and early-stage entrepreneurial finance.

Engineering Innovation by Design: Solutions for the real world

11/12/12 Fung Institute/CET — Hundreds of researchers, designers and industry leaders gathered at Berkeley on Tuesday, Nov. 13, for the 2012 Global Technology Leaders conference, Engineering Innovation by Design. Sessions explored emerging technologies that meet real-world needs in health care, energy efficiency, sustainability and other fields. (The conference webcast is now online.)