Going 0️⃣➡️1️⃣ can be very hard but very rewarding: starting from an idea 🌱, partnering up with my long-time collaborator Julia Wagner 🤝, and last week successfully delivering the first ETH-EPFL Sciencepreneurship Summer School in Zurich, Switzerland, has been exactly such a rewarding journey! 🚀

🔥 This is a story of intersecting supportive #innovation communities and setting them up for #success. We succeeded in bringing together an exclusive but diverse group of 30 of the most entrepreneurial graduate #students from globally leading #universities with experienced #sciencepreneurs and ecosystem players.

Community

Bringing together a community of (1) students, (2) experienced sciencepreneurs, and (3) ecosystem players.

Program

Interactive lectures & workshops 🤓

The program and its lecturers were definitely not your average course experience:

• day 1: #opportunity identification by Anil Sethi, #vision by Alex Ilic, #team and #pitching by Antonia Albert - Stephan Seyboth - Isabelle Siegrist,
• day 2: tech #commercialization by Jana Thiel, #legal by Umberto Milano, #business models by Réginald Bien-Aimé,
• day 3: #gtm by William R. Cockayne, Ph.D., #venturefinancing by Cynthia Jurytko, #IP & #equity by Alex Ilic - Claudia Scheckel,
• day 4: selling to customers by Georges Khneysser, selling to VCs by Thomas Meier, #society & #diversity by Nettra Pan 👁.

Panel discussions 🎯

A set of three inspiring panels on

• “going from idea to exit” with Murielle Schreck, Pascal Weinberger, Herbert Bay
• “funding opportunities & risks” with Karim Maizar, Antonia Albert, Georges Khneysser, Gabriele Schwarz
• “unconventional sciencepreneurs” with Christophe Moser, Roland Siegwart, Hervé Lebret

Socials

🥂 Work hard, play hard: hotel 🏨, drinks 🍹, and all food 🍽️ at the faculty club covered. Boat apéro trip on Lake Zurich ⛵ & partner apéro at the new ETH AI Center 🦾.

Pitches

🎤 All these learnings culminated in team project pitches with jury Christophe Moser, Roland Siegwart, Hervé Lebret, and Tomas Brenner.

Thanks 🙏

Next to thanking foremost the best possible co-organizer Julia Wagner, there are many people and organizations to thank here, including:

• EPFL and ETH Zürich for providing the joint Summer School framework! Thanks everyone for helping build this supportive community, and I am grateful for all the spontaneous positive oral, email, and text messages as well as the participants’ unexpected tasty gift to us, the organizers! 🍫
• My professional network and my incredibly supportive mentors! You know who you are ;).
• A special mention goes to our formal academic supporters and reliable professors Christophe Moser and Hans Gersbach.

Future

👍 Follow, like, comment, and repost for more updates. Register your interest on https://sciencepreneurship.ch. What’s next? Please connect and reach out if you are interested in getting involved in the future as a student, sciencepreneur, or ecosystem player! 🚀