President's Innovation Challenge

About this programme

The President's Innovation Challenge (PIC) is an annual competition run by Harvard Innovation Labs for Harvard students and a select group of alumni and affiliates who are building ventures that advance their fields. It runs alongside the i-lab's Venture Program: students opt into the PIC when they apply to the 14-week Spring Venture Program, so PIC applicants also get 1:1 staff advising, matched mentorship, expert office hours and networking through that program regardless of whether they end up winning a prize.

The Bertarelli Foundation, co-founded by Ernesto Bertarelli (Harvard M.B.A. '93), is the funding partner behind the challenge; awards are described as a gift from the foundation. The 2025 edition awarded $517,000 in non-dilutive funding across its winners, up slightly from $510,000 in 2022. Harvard Innovation Labs staff, including Managing Director Becca Xiong and Senior Director Meagan Hall, run the program.

In the 2022 cycle, the i-lab received over 400 applications, its highest number to that point, and accepted fewer than a third of applicants as Semi-Finalists.

How it works

Accepted ventures are placed into tracks. In the 2022 cycle these were Social Impact, Health & Life Sciences, and Open (for ventures that cross categories), plus two feeder categories: Launch Lab X GEO, for alumni-led ventures, and the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, for biotech and life sciences startups; teams from those two labs are automatically accepted as Semi-Finalists. Each track has awarded $100,000 in Bertarelli Foundation prize money, split between one grand prize and one runner-up.

The process runs in three phases across roughly seven months: Application (teams apply, typically opening in mid-November and closing in early January), Selection (Semi-Finalists refine their ventures from January to March, then Finalists are chosen), and Celebration (Finalists pitch live to a judging panel, with awards announced at a May Awards Ceremony). In 2025 the ceremony produced five $75,000 grand-prize winners, five $25,000 runner-up winners, and five further Ingenuity Award winners: Gurus Inc., Halo Braid, PeriPeach, Regatta Bio and The Paal took the $75,000 awards; Adaptive Reader, Brain Exercise Initiative, HydroHaul, Modulate Bio and Radiate Biosciences took the $25,000 awards; AIRQUA, Pythia Diagnostics, SAMI+, SpiroSniff and Wyndergy received Ingenuity Awards.

Semi-Finalist applications are reviewed by a panel described, in the 2022 cycle, as more than 200 judges: a mix of entrepreneurs, operators, investors, nonprofit experts and specialists, who score applications and also give feedback teams can use to refine their venture. Winning the prize money does not require giving up equity, and teams are not required to use it in any specific way.

Who can apply

Open to venture teams led by at least one matriculated, degree-seeking Harvard student, including undergraduates, graduates, postdoctoral fellows and clinical fellows, across all of Harvard's schools, plus a select group of Harvard alumni and affiliate-led ventures (largely through Launch Lab X GEO and the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab). Teams may include non-Harvard entrepreneurs, scientists or industry executives, but a Harvard student must be a founder and committed leader of the team, and a venture with non-Harvard affiliates must submit its application through the Harvard affiliate.

Qualifying ventures must have moved beyond initial ideation; the program looks for market traction such as customers, users, signed partnerships or funds from professional investors.

Teams may only submit one application, and an individual applicant may only be part of one team's application. In the 2022 cycle, one of the venture's founders needed to graduate in May of the application year or after, the venture could not have raised more than $750,000 in dilutive funding by the application deadline, and a venture that had won a $75,000 or $25,000 PIC prize in the past two years was ineligible to re-enter.

How to apply

1. Apply when you apply to the i-lab's Spring Venture Program; the PIC is an opt-in section of that single application rather than a separate form.
2. Applications for the following spring's PIC have opened in mid-November and closed in early January in recent cycles (for example, January 5, 2022 at 11:59pm EST).

Frequently asked

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Reviewed 2026-09-25. Programmes change, so check eligibility, amounts and deadlines on the official page before you apply. CapEasy is a private firm and is not part of any government body.