From Idea to Prototype
The International Create Challenge is a free of charge, 3-week immersive super accelerator program that gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to drive their projects to a Minimum Viable Product. It is a unique program combining state-of-art technologies and cutting edge research, mentors-lead coaching, micro-seed investment and a star prize of more than CHF 100’000.- Registration is now open.
Switzerland is among the leading innovative countries, with its universities, research institutions and engineering schools ranking among the best in the world. This creates a natural breeding ground for start-up activities. However, the lack of a comprehensive program that combines training, mentorship and early stage investment stalls the progress of technology start-up creation.
International Create Challenge (ICC) intends to address this gap. The ICC’2013 is an initiative supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) on Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2), via its association (AIM2), and the Idiap Research Institute (Idiap).
The initiative is facilitating start-up/ spin-out creation within the framework of the IM2/Idiap domains of research and technologies. Those research themes are: Perceptual and cognitive systems, Social/ human behavior, Information interfaces and presentation, Biometric Person Recognition and Machine learning.
ICC’2013 is a free of charge 3-week immersive program in which around 10 teams of 2 - 4 people, composed of developers, researchers, entrepreneurs and/or designers, will be engaged. The best three teams will each receive CHF 10’000.- cash of prize money. There is also the possibility to negotiate seed funding in exchange of up to 10-15% of equity of the created company. Should one of the teams decide to create a company locally at the IdeArk Incubator, additional grants will be delivered: an open access to the The Ark Incubator with in-kind support of over CHF100,000.-, CHF 10’000.- in the form of a The Ark Scholarship and other advantages.
Anybody can apply who is over the age of 18 at the moment of application, has an entrepreneurial spirit and at least one of the three following skills: developer/researcher, designer, entrepreneur.
The call is split into two successive competitive steps. Application for the first step is 14 June.
More information can be found on the website of the ICC 2013 and in the Call for Participation which can be downloaded below.
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The new Swiss Venture Capital Report was published on 26 January. It analyses 304 financing rounds closed in 2020 and includes further article such as an interview with Michael Hengartner, President of the ETH Board, and a list of Swiss "soonicorns". 
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