Giving our entrepreneurial university wings

Where can like-minded individuals with innovative ideas meet up, get to know one another and enjoy fruitful exchanges? What specific offers and assistance relating to the topic of entrepreneurship are available at the ZHAW? And how can those with entrepreneurial objectives best navigate the bureaucratic jungle they find themselves confronted with? Various teams are devoting themselves to finding the answers to such questions as part of the first Innovation Challenge.

After all, as an entrepreneurial university, the ZHAW should become a place where people who think and act entrepreneurially are able to meet and flourish by tackling and overcoming challenges. This innovation process, which has been launched by the “ZHAW entrepreneurship” strategic initiative, is focussing on the development of innovative projects, starting with team building and the generation of ideas and culminating in their ultimate implementation. “We want as many students, employees and external parties as possible to participate in this open innovation process,” says Anita Buchli, Co-Director of ZHAW entrepreneurship.

With their idea, the team headed by Zifei Wang-Speiser, for example, would like to create a meeting place that isn't constrained by interdisciplinary boundaries. “We want to create an experience where students and employees from every department within the ZHAW can come together and build a greenhouse on a collaborative basis, providing them a place in which they can plant, harvest, cook and eat together. Everyone can play their part, as no specific skills are required,” explains the research associate from the ZHAW Institute of Facility Management, who believes that this experience will do more than just facilitate the transdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and skills. “While working together on this tangible project, those participating are provided with a setting for spontaneous encounters and the emergence of unexpected ideas.”

Raphael Wolfensberger and his team, for example, are working to provide better guidance in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship at the ZHAW. “We have found that efforts to promote innovation at the university in some cases run in parallel to one another. In order to make better use of these synergies, it would make sense to have a central point of contact.” The idea that they have in mind is an online platform that serves to combine existing offers while also providing coaching and a marketplace for problems that need to be solved. This should lead to greater transparency and lively exchanges between the Schools, ultimately further facilitating innovation in the process.

The various teams first had to come together at a boot camp to mark the launch of the first ZHAW Innovation Challenge before working together to develop ideas and convince one another of their merits. Since then, the participants have been meeting regularly at so-called deep dive events, where they receive support from experienced growth coaches and are inspired by the input delivered as part of presentations given by successful entrepreneurs.

As part of this iterative process, the teams experiment and test their project ideas. “This allows us to gradually make progress and thereby develop things that are innovative and things that we may not even have thought of previously,” explains Anita Buchli, Co-Director of ZHAW entrepreneurship. “After all, the ZHAW will in future find itself faced with an ever-increasing number of issues, challenges and initiatives that require rapid action and that cannot be dealt with ideally within the framework of the usual processes and procedures applying established methods.”

“We launched this Innovation Challenge because we want to promote an entrepreneurial mindset among ZHAW staff and students,” says Hanna Brahme, Co-Director of ZHAW entrepreneurship. “However, we haven’t committed to a specific idea. Instead, we are looking for dedicated teams who are enthusiastic about their ideas and want to put them to the test in reality.” The teams formed at the Innovation Challenge boot camp will work on the selected ideas and solutions throughout the entire year as so-called “innovators”. At a pitching event in mid-November, they will receive critical feedback from a jury. Here, they will be tasked with convincing the jury members of the added value that will be generated for staff and students by their idea as well as its feasibility. The winning teams will then go on to implement their innovative projects and test them in reality, bringing the ZHAW one step closer to achieving its goal of becoming a leading entrepreneurial university in the process.