Each team had to convince an illustrious panel of judges, including Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace prize winner and micro-finance entrepreneur, that theirs was the best business model that could offer a solution to the global food crisis and issues of food insecurity affecting much of the developing world.

A team from McGill University in Montreal, Canada scooped the significant prize money with their fledgling business, Aspire, which seeks to grow, process and sell edible insects as a efficient and viable source of food. The team’s main food product was a fortified flour, a mix of ground cricket powder and cassava, that tastes extremely similar to pure flour.

Team member Sobhita Soor explained to judges and over 1,000 guests that 2.4 billion people already regularly eat insects. “We should look to the sky, not to the ground,” she counselled when using business initiative to overcome food and nutrition problems.

Ex-President of the US, Bill Clinton, was on hand to present the delighted winners with a trophy because the HULT Prize is endorsed by Clinton and held on the fringes of the Clinton Global Initiative event.

The HULT Prize initiative was launched in 2010 and is intended to forge a new generation of social entrepreneurs; it was the brainchild of HULT alumnus, Ahmad Ashkar. HULT International Business School is keen to carve out an identity as a global, progressive and disrupting educator.

The US$1 million prize money is donated by the HULT family, which took over (and renamed) the HULT International Business School in the USA in 2003 and owns major international education operator, EF (set up by Bertil Hult in 1965).

The winning team beat stiff competition from teams that included seed-planting innovation Reel Gardening from University of Cape Town, South Africa and SokoText from London School of Economics in the UK, which fielded an interesting b2b solution for enabling small kiosk vendors to leverage a mobile platform to achieve better purchasing power through a cooperative.

The six teams all got to take part in a business-style boot camp, accessing mentors and road-testing their business idea. In all, 11,000 teams bid to win the HULT Prize, including teams from most top business schools and universities.

Dr Stephen Hodges, President of HULT International Business School, said the Hult Prize was now the “largest student competition in the world” with every major university fielding a team.

Muhammad Yunus, one of the judges, also spoke at the competition, endorsing the vision of HULT and observing that social entrepreneurship through business held much more potential than a one-off charitable donation.