Event Recap: Civic Innovation Challenge
How does Berkeley prepare the next generation of leaders? By breaking down barriers and introducing students to new ways of approaching old challenges and innovating new ideas. This past February, I got the chance to see a great example of this at the inaugural Civic Innovation Challenge (CIC). I was also reminded Haas is one of many places on campus where innovators and entrepreneurs can thrive!
The CIC is a week-long design sprint hosted through the Big Ideas program at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Big Ideas is a 20-year program that supports interdisciplinary teams with mentors and industry professionals to tackle challenges and pitch for funding. The CIC utilized this same tried-and-true framework and participants were judged on Big Ideas’ core values: social impact, sustainability, feasibility, and scalability. Over seven days of workshops, mentorship sessions, and rapid prototyping, undergraduate and graduate students worked alongside city stakeholders to develop actionable solutions to real municipal issues.
Unlike pitch competitions I’d attended at Haas, where founders chased disruption and VCs mentally calculated equity stakes, the ideas at CIC were smaller in scale but heavier in weight. This wasn’t venture capital. There were no projections of billion-dollar markets. Instead, students were grappling with procurement constraints, accessibility compliance deadlines, and the realities of public accountability. The problems were local, but the impact felt more personal.
Among the winning teams was AccCo, a project focused on improving digital accessibility across government workflows.
Unlike pitch competitions I’d attended at Haas, where founders chased disruption and VCs mentally calculated equity stakes, the ideas at CIC were smaller in scale but heavier in weight.
Accessibility After the Fact
AccCo’s work centers on a deceptively simple issue: inaccessible PDFs. Most government documents begin in tools like PowerPoint or Word and get exported straight to PDF. By the time accessibility issues are discovered, fixes are slow, expensive, and manual. For years, limited enforcement meant accessibility slipped to the bottom of the to‑do list. For the Bay Area’s roughly 109,000 blind and visually impaired residents, something as basic as an untagged or poorly formatted document can make city information impossible to read with a screen reader. Berkeley ranks amongst the most accessible cities in the nation, yet digital barriers persist because accessibility isn’t built into the process from the start.
New federal regulations are changing that equation. In April 2024, the Federal Register published the Department of Justice’s final rule updating its regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The final rule has specific requirements about how to ensure that web content and mobile applications (apps) are accessible to people with disabilities. Read more here.
The deadlines are firm: larger jurisdictions must comply by April 26, 2026, and smaller ones by April 26, 2027. But a regulation on paper is only half the battle. If the staff responsible for publishing city documents don’t have the tools, training, or workflows to actually implement accessible formatting in their day-to-day work, the policy will fail in practice no matter how well-written it is. The gap between policy improvement and practice is where most accessibility efforts quietly collapse.
For the Bay Area’s roughly 109,000 blind and visually impaired residents, something as basic as an untagged or poorly formatted document can make city information impossible to read with a screen reader.
The Human Side of Innovation
The students behind AccCo brought Artificial Intelligence (AI) into this workflow, acting like the “Grammarly for ADA compliance.” The system reviews PDFs, flags missing tags and alt text, and suggests ways to close accessibility gaps. AccCo doesn’t replace experts, it just makes their work faster and more manageable.
As the student team framed it, this wasn’t about automating empathy, but about scaling it. AI helps move things along, but human judgment keeps the process accountable. That balance is what makes AccCo’s approach so compelling.
At Haas, we often learn to think about scale in the language of markets and growth curves. The CIC offered a different lens. In civic work, scale can mean something far more grounded: meeting a compliance deadline, easing an overworked department’s review process, or simply making a blind resident’s experience with public documents a little less frustrating.
Small wins, in this context, ripple outward. A few more accessible PDFs might not transform an industry, but they can strengthen trust between a city and its residents. That’s a form of impact that’s harder to graph but no less meaningful.
What made the CIC special wasn’t just the ideas themselves, but the way they took shape through collaboration, listening, and a sense of shared purpose. Each team partnered closely with city departments, grounding their designs in the lived realities of public employees and residents alike.
Coordinating industry and policy
As a Haas student, this experience pushed me to look beyond a purely business-centric lens. Throughout my collegiate career I have sought out courses at the intersection of multiple disciplines, most recently the Bio-inspired Innovation Challenge Lab through the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, where we learned to draw on nature’s own problem-solving strategies to build sustainable ventures. These experiences, including CIC, have shifted something in how I see the world: the problems that matter most don’t belong to any single field. There is no purely business problem, just as there is no purely policy problem or purely scientific one. There are just problems that are complex, human, and stubborn that demand more lenses than any one discipline can offer.
These experiences, including CIC, have shifted something in how I see the world: the problems that matter most don’t belong to any single field.
Civic innovation, at its core, is about co‑creation. It reframes innovation not as disruption but as care building systems that serve more people, more fairly, and with more thought. The inaugural Civic Innovation Challenge showed how academic creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation, and civic purpose can meet in the middle to produce solutions that are practical, human‑centered, and deeply rooted in community.
