Students from 12 global campuses team up to develop solutions for an international company in Maine
Northeastern’s first Global Innovation Challenge unites students across the global network in the name of entrepreneurship.
When you’re a law firm operating in over 80 countries, how do you ensure your employees are familiar with the culture, business practices and client expectations in each country where you operate?
This was the question posed to teams in the inaugural NU Global Innovation Challenge. Eighty-eight Northeastern University students from across 12 global campuses were divided into four-person teams, consisting of students from different campuses and pursuing different majors, to develop a solution to help Dentons, an international law firm, deliver localized legal services in the 80-plus countries where it operates.
The results included AI-fueled chatbots that dispensed information, company dashboards with cultural guidelines, and an exchange program that allows associates to spend a year working in a different Dentons global office. These three solutions caught the judges’ eyes during the preliminary round of the competition and will go up against each other in the final rounds at Northeastern’s Roux Institute in Portland, Maine, during Startup Maine Week, an annual gathering of founders and investors collaborating to move Maine’s innovation economy forward.
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Janet Garcia, an artificial intelligence master’s degree student from the Pacific Tech team that made it to the finals, told NGN that members of her group all had backgrounds working on AI-related projects. They channeled this and pitched the idea for a chatbot that Dentons employees could use like ChatGPT, but to ask questions about company policies or international legal matters.
For example, a lawyer could use this bot to access another Dentons attorney’s past cases and contact information instead of searching online or contacting other employees, Garcia explained, adding the chatbot could also be programmed to include company policies and respond with direct answers to employee inquiries.
Overall, students from 10 different campuses are in the finals, including Garcia and her teammates, Karan Singh, a computer science graduate student from Seattle, and Anahid Raisrohani, who is pursuing a master’s degree in data analytics engineering in Vancouver.
Judges from each campus evaluated the teams within their region and chose three final teams with one from each region. The Atlantic Bridge teams included students from London, Portland, Boston and New York. The Eastern Corridor teams represented Arlington, Miami, Charlotte and Toronto while the Pacific Tech teams had participants from Silicon Valley, Oakland, Seattle and Vancouver.
The differences between the fields of study were vast, but those varied perspectives of students allowed them to come up with a strong solution that allowed them to advance to the finals, said Riley Anderson, a finalist on the Atlantic Bridge team. Anderson is pursuing his master’s degree in biotechnology at the Portland campus and his teammates are political science student Siddharth Gupta from Boston, London international business student Sahar Adbalah and economics student Anikka Villarreal from the New York campus.
Their proposal was an expanded global segment program where Dentons employees, in an effort to connect with people in other Dentons locations, would rotate through the different offices to expand their knowledge base and connections.
While the team did research into the firm when developing the solution, Anderson said they were also inspired by their own collaboration when they saw the benefits of working with students from other majors and campuses.
“We are proof that meeting people from different (places) and global exchange is really important to the fostering of ideas and community,” he said.
The idea for the challenge came from “hackathons” where participants are tasked with solving a problem, often for an outside institution within a certain timeframe, Emily Morrow, a student entrepreneurship program manager at the Roux, told Northeastern Global News.
“The initial thought was ‘Can this large and diverse group of students that embodies what Northeastern means work together to come up with a single solution?’” Morrow said. “It happened to parallel really well with what Dentons represents and what we represent.”
Morrow wanted to create a hackathon challenge to unite Northeastern’s global network. A planning committee of faculty and staff from the entrepreneurship teams at Northeastern’s Oakland, London, New York and Portland campuses devised a plan for the Global Innovation Challenge, which combines the problem-solving and experiential learning component of a hackathon on a broader scale.
Applications opened in January. By the March 15 deadline, 136 students from 12 global campuses had applied. Four days later, on March 19, 88 students came together to hear the challenge question and spent four hours working with their new teams to come up with a solution in the preliminary round.
