It’s not long before the founders of Bee Healthy are onto the buzz of diversity. “It’s been super helpful,” says Kelsey Julius, explaining how her band of MSc class-mates came together to enter the Hult Prize.

"Our Chinese team-member Haitao [Yu] participated in the Prize last year and he basically recruited our team. When he sent out messages, everyone said: ‘Yes!’.”

Haitao didn’t take home the grand prize for HEC Paris, the leading French business school, but he will be hoping his new team can go the distance in September this year.

The team of five – Kelsey, Haitao, Yolaine de Cacqueray, Tobias Horstmann and Juliet Phillips – couldn’t be much more different in background. But they share a common goal. And Kelsey is hoping their diversity will bank them the $1 million winning prize, while HEC’s prestige and the world’s pressing health problems are also at stake.

“We have different points of view on the topic, but it has also been challenging because we are so different,” she says of the team’s Hult Prize start-up idea. “But we don’t just accept the first thing that comes to our mind now, and that has become one of our biggest strengths.”

The French-based team are through to the finals of the fifth annual competition, which has seen thousands of business school students sign-up. More than 10,000 applicants began the journey – yet only 300 start-ups from around the world made it far enough to pitch their start-up ideas in the regional finals.

Last month Kelsey and co snatched the prize in London, one of the regional destinations, from a bevy of top business school teams.

The real challenge, though, is to build a sustainable and scalable social enterprise, which can address non-communicable diseases in urban slums across the world.

As if that wasn’t enough, they are doing it all while balancing an MSc in Sustainable Development. “We all had an idea of social business,” says Kelsey, sitting next to Yolaine and Juliet. “In our Master’s they do a range of certificates and one of them is in social business, and a large majority of our group [cohort] are going into that certificate. So we definitely had it in our minds before we met.”

The 12-month course, delivered in English at HEC, was developed in light of the environmental and societal issues that are now well known in the business world. The school's ambition, it says, is to train “future change-makers and leaders” who are able to build a sustainable economy.

“The program is very highly-ranked; it’s one of the oldest in sustainable development,” says Juliet, a New Zealander who wanted a taste of Europe. “Something that really helped us was a class on innovative business models,” Kelsey pitches-in. “We did a lot of pitching of other companies’ models and that helped us create our competition pitch and explain our idea to our audience.”

As the Hult Prize has grown in stature, aided no doubt by the backing of former U.S president Bill Clinton, so too has social entrepreneurship. Business schools have doubled their socially impactful content in recent years; entrepreneurship is ever-popular; social enterprises now benefit from more government and investor funding.

There are just two months until the Hult Prize Accelerator kicks off, but there is so much more for Bee Healthy’s founders to do. The HEC group’s start-up concept is an innovative solution to improve diabetes detection in urban slums.

They hope to harness the power of bees’ olfactory systems to detect diabetes on people’s breath. That will eliminate the need for needles, reducing the cost of a medical visit. The by-products of the start-up, which include honey, propolis and wax, will be sold in developed economies. They hope it will create a link between the first and third worlds – while financing the diabetes detection program.

Kelsey’s team stumbled upon the idea while scanning internet articles on low-tech ways to diagnose diseases. “We even saw an article about using dogs to sniff out cancer,” she says. “It [the bee idea] came up in our meeting so it just evolved from there. It's interesting and unique.”

She continues: “We wanted to work on disease prevention, but it was recommended we didn’t."

Kelsey already runs her own start-up, Fish Your Food, an urban aquaponics company which harnesses the power of fish waste to grow fresh food locally in France, but she insists other commitments won’t slow their progress down.

Yet other finalist teams may be better prepared. HEC is up against big-name schools in the form of Wharton, the Indian School of Business, and ESADE, among others. The worry is that Bee Healthy’s concept has taken longer to develop than others.

“We were impressed by the levels of different schools, but I think something that’s been a strength is that we’re not assuming we’re going to win,” Kelsey says, humbly.  

“We’re not looking at is as competition, but as an opportunity to implement something that will help. It’s more genuine than going after the money.

“We just started developing this idea and we’ve read that some schools have been working on projects for a long time, so there’s no time now for us to show up with an idea with the same level of preparation. But just being passionate about it is our take.”

But $1 million in seed-funding, the ultimate prize, is surely an incentive? “It would be absolutely amazing,” replies Kelsey. “We were in disbelief when we won the regional round. When we had a minute to calm down, we realized we had this amazing opportunity, and we have to do our best to make it happen.”

For Kelsey, making it so far in this competition was an “oh gosh” moment. She launched her start-up before signing up for the Hult Prize and there is clearly an issue of time commitment, not to mention studying for a Master’s alongside these entrepreneurial ventures.

While Haitao is keen to develop this idea in China, whether they take home gold in the final or not, it’s too early to for the rest of the team to make a firm decision.

The social solution is supposed to impact 25 million people, Kelsey points out, and they are open to the idea of working in different regions of the world, under the same Bee Healthy brand.

But there is no doubt that the seed funding, as well as the time spent in the Hult Prize Accelerator, will help them implement their vision.

After the bee idea, it’s time to make the judges buzz.