The Applied Innovation Institute was originally founded as the Berkeley Mobile International Collaborative (BMIC) in 2009.
The concept started as a Mobile Innovation & Entrepreneurship class, taught by Ken Singer at UC Berkeley in the Fall of 2008 in which students competed in the same way that companies compete for investment dollars.
After two successful years of “beta testing” the program, BMIC was formed by Ken Singer, Paul Nerger, and Bill Washburn to take the concepts of the competitive nature of the course and turn it into a global competition between universities worldwide.