Talent Kick | Our Community

UNIVERSITY PARTNERS

We collaborate closely with some of the best universities in Switzerland as we want to see their Master- and PhD-students well represented in our cohorts and ensure that their best talents get access to Talent Kick.

With university ambassadors and task forces at the most important campuses we ensure together that the students going through Talent Kick also easily integrate with the many great entrepreneurship programs offered locally and actively use synergies with their academic programs.

Talent Kick is always open for new academic partners to provide the best environment for interdisciplinary teams to form and develop across Swiss universities.

To become a partner university reach out to us!

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Pascale Vonmont

“Talent Kick fills a crucial gap in the Swiss start-up ecosystem. The program is personalised, integrative and creates synergies between entrepreneurship and studies. The focus on developing entrepreneurial teams with a program jointly anchored at Swiss universities is unique and central”

Prof. Dr. Dietmar Grichnik

“For us, Talent Kick stands for the targeted support and fostering of entrepreneurial personalities - and that already during their studies. As an entrepreneurial university, we offer our students at the University of St. Gallen the necessary toolset to realise their own start-up during their studies. With Talent Kick, we promote talents in an integrative and interdisciplinary way with entrepreneurial best practices.”

Dr. Maria Olivares

“Being part of the Talent Kick program we foster even more the interdisciplinary co-creation we envision at the University of Zürich. With Talent Kick innovation is driven by diverse mixed teams across Swiss universities and young people of various backgrounds and competencies are empowered to work and think entrepreneurially – and that is fantastic.”

Prof. Dr. Roland Siegwart

“Today we are pretty good at the Swiss universities to have teams working to push their startup, but what we need is complementary teams! Only this can bring success. Talent Kick is about bringing the best teams together. It will allow universities to be more successful with their startups coming out of research, because early on it allows students to form teams with people from other universities which makes the whole process more successful.”

PD Dr. Alexander Ilic

"I'm excited that after developing the early foundations for this program, it finally comes to life! Especially in the area of AI, it is super critical to bring together a strong interdisciplinary team. That is why we support and participate in Talent Kick already since the beginning. At the ETH AI Center we continue to see Talent Kick as a strong building block and we encourage our best talents with entrepreneurial ambitions to apply."

Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch

“For building up a team that can be successful on an international level, you need interdisciplinarity. If you look at the tasks you have to perform in a company you need to have different mental models with some overlap. This means you have to mix students from different universities. Its important that the universities at least on some level work together to generate these world class teams, which create workplaces of tomorrow.”

Marc Gruber

“Talent Kick brings a new set of opportunities to the ecosystem by enabling students to develop their leadership skills and to meet students from other universities (…) I think this mix is highly important, and having an additional offering like this one is therefore instrumental.”

Sébastien Hug

“One of the reasons why we reached out to Talent Kick last year is because we all know that an absolute key ingredient for successful startups is the team. One of our roles as the innovation office, is taking the students out of the lab and connect them with the ecosystem. This is where Talent Kick plays an absolute crucial role with connecting all those Swiss talents together.”

Emmanuelle Reuter

“Talent Kick is a very important addition to our initiatives at University of Neuchâtel, not only does it allow students to foster their entrepreneurial skills on real life challenges, but also enables them to develop their soft skills by working in interdisciplinary teams across regions of Switzerland and being coached by experts. The Talent Kick program is an important (complement) to the more traditional curriculum of our University.”

Julien Levallois

“When building as startup, It is a key challenge to create a team and to find the right co-founders. Talent Kick is an added value for student-entrepreneur to find the right co-founders.”

GLOBAL PROGRAM PARTNERS

Swissnex is the Swiss global network connecting Switzerland and the world in education, research and innovation. Our mission is to support the outreach and active engagement of our partners in the international exchange of knowledge, ideas and talents. We thereby contribute to strengthening Switzerland's profile as a world-leading innovation hotspot.

SWISS-WIDE PROGRAM PARTNERS

Venture Kick was launched in 2007 with the vision to double the number of spin-offs from Swiss universities, to accelerate their speed-to-market and to raise the attractiveness of these young companies among professional investors and industry partners. We encourage our teams to go onwards to the nine-month kicking process to solidify and strengthen their journey from science to market.

Venturelab has been improving and expanding the support offered to Switzerland's top entrepreneurs, continuously developing and deploying new tools and programs. To date, Venturelab has backed more than 1,000 startups in their global growth, supporting over 50,000 people in the startup ecosystem across various programs and events.

«First Ventures» provides up to CHF 150,000 for students and graduates of Universities of Applied Sciences eager to launch their own spin-off.

The Swiss Startup Association (SSA) is the umbrella organization of the Swiss startup ecosystem. The SSA focuses on bringing all stakeholders closer together to achieve two main goals: more startups and improving conditions for existing ones in Switzerland. With 1,600 members, the SSA serves as the central point of contact and provides startups with a comprehensive range of services.

S2S Ventures is an independent students-2-students Venture Capital fund. S2S helps teams demystify the funding process, offering personalized feedback and support, and investing CHF 25'000 pre-seed capital into promising startups.

Rready is a Zurich-based startup that engages third party employees to unleash their full potential. They stand for a playful approach without buzzword-bingo or innovation theatre. Talent Kick uses their KICKBOX method in our program, KICKBOX, based on a methodology used by +1000 of companies, works bottom-up by tapping into the distributed knowledge of their employees and allows them to go from a raw idea to a successful implementation.

MENTORS, BUSINESS ANGELS & DOMAIN EXPERT

Are you interested in supporting the best entrepreneurial talents in Switzerland through Talent Kick?

Fill out the form and join our community of mentors, business angels, and domain experts. We will save your contact details and share those with selected teams that can benefit from your experience. If a team is interested in your expertise, we will facilitate an introduction.

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