ETH-EPFL Sciencepreneurship Summer School 2023
An overview on the results of organizing the first entrepreneurial ETH-EPFL Summer School.
Going 0️⃣➡️1️⃣ can be very hard but very rewarding: starting from an idea 🌱, partnering up with my long-time collaborator Julia Wagner 🤝, and in April 2023 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
The program is foremost about bringing together a community of students, experienced sciencepreneurs, top academics, and ecosystem players.
Program
The program consisted of (1) interactive lectures & workshops, (2) panel discussions, (3) bonding socials, and (4) final pitches & prizes. In what follows, I will go in more detail on what these parts exactly included together with some pictures!
Interactive lectures & workshops 🤓
The 1 ECTS credit program and its lecturers were definitely not your average course experience:
- day 1:
- #opportunity identification by Anil Sethi (ETH Zurich)
- #vision by Alex Ilic (ETH AI Center)
- #team by Antonia Albert (Wingman Ventures)
- #pitching design by Isabelle Siegrist (Sandborn)
- day 2:
- tech #commercialization by Jana Thiel (ETH Zurich)
- #legal by Umberto Milano (Kellerhals Carrard)
- #business models by Réginald Bien-Aimé (Mindstone)
- day 3:
- #go-to-market by William R. Cockayne (Stanford University)
- #venturefinancing by Cynthia Jurytko (Ebay)
- #IP & #equity by Alex Ilic (ETH AI Center) & Claudia Scheckel (Oncobit)
- #pitch finetuning by Stephan Seyboth (Mo Unicorn Coaching)
- day 4:
- selling to #customers by Georges Khneysser (QBIT Capital)
- selling to #VCs by Thomas Meier (Lightbird Ventures)
- #society & #diversity by Nettra Pan (Bayes Business School)
Panel discussions 🎯
Almost every day there was a panel, moderated by Réginald Bien-Aimé, with three inspiring discussions 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 🎤 & Prizes 🏆
All these learnings culminated in team project pitches with jury Christophe Moser, Roland Siegwart, Hervé Lebret, and Tomas Brenner.
Acknowledgements 🙏
Next to thanking foremost the best possible co-organizer Julia Wagner, there are many people and organizations to thank here, including:
- EPFL and ETH Zurich for providing the EPFL-ETH Summer School framework!
- Our official partners: ETH AI Center, EPFL CIS, Gebert Ruf Stiftung, Kellerhals Carrard, Wingman Ventures, QBIT Capital.
- A special mention goes to our formal academic supporters and reliable professors Christophe Moser (EPFL) and Hans Gersbach (ETH Zurich).
- I acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 754354.
Conclusion and Future 🔮
I am incredibly grateful for all the spontaneous positive oral, email, and text messages as well as the participants’ unexpected tasty gift to us, the organizers! 🍫
👍 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 an organizer, student, sciencepreneur, or ecosystem player! 🚀