Successful first edition of the Energy Startup Day
On November 4th 2015, ETH’s Group for Sustainability and Technology together with ZHAW Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and Impact Hub Zürich hosted the first Energy Startup Day at the Umweltarena Spreitenbach.
The event was a great networking-opportunity for the 95 attendees, ranging from start-ups, utilities, the public sector, research institutions to NGOs. Energy start-ups presented their innovative business ideas during an extended poster session. During keynote speeches, DownloadDr. Bastien Girod from ETH gave interesting insights into the policy challenges that cleantech start-ups face in Switzerland. DownloadDevon Wemyss from ZHAW elaborated on current research from several perspectives, highlighting a promising win-win situation: “Collaboration is essential for all cleantech start-ups in our study”, she stated and also added that large companies can benefit from collaborating as they can accelerate prototyping with an external risk taker, develop innovative products or services without major organizational changes and gain access to external skills. In addition Andreas Witzig, founder of DownloadVela Solaris and Andrew Shaw, co-founder of DownloadAnerdgy, explained the benefits of partnering with other organizations from a start-up’s point of view.
Based on this positive experience and great feedbacks of attendees, the organizers work on a second edition of the Energy Startup Day in 2016.
Three other articles about the event were published by DownloadZHAW, Downloadstartupticker.ch and Downloadenergeia plus.com, the blog of the DownloadSwiss Federal Office of Energy SFOE.