ETH Entrepreneur Club on tour: InCube at MIT

Signe Lin, who was the VP of Events of the ETH Entrepreneur Club last year, came up with the idea and motivation to organize InCube, the flagship event of the student association, here in Boston at MIT. InCube? The event has a simple Leitmotiv: placing large cubes with glass walls in public locations, having teams of students live in there for four days and letting them work on a real-life entrepreneurial challenge. The goal? Appealing to the curiosity of passersby, having a transparent innovation process while creating a creative thinking space for the students; a different approach aiming at new and fresh ideas in this condensed space and time. This pop-up hackathon seemed perfect for the “land of hackathons”, a name that would be appropriate for the MIT campus, a university that takes pride in its long history of hacking. However, would a team of four students already busy with our thesis work, be able to handle this additional workload?

This definitely helped us to navigate through the administrative ramifications of the institute, including coordinating with the responsibles for facilities, for EHS, for licensing, and from the police. Many authorisations were necessary, and until shortly before the actual event it was uncertain if we would be able to make everything happen as planned. We also had to find partners for food and furniture, run marketing campaigns and participant interviews, while securing the funds from a main sponsor. However, in between the hardships, some memorable moments stand out. One of them is probably meeting the senior management of our main sponsor Stryker in a meeting room at the top of a high-rise building with an incredible view over downtown Boston.

We are now looking back at a successful first edition of InCube abroad. The five MIT students first got a taste of Switzerland and of the Swiss innovation landscape through a workshop weekend at Crans-Montana and a tour of Zurich, ETH, and of the Rocket Hub, the start-up co-working space of the ETH Entrepreneur Club.

The students worked on a medical technology challenge set by our corporate partner Stryker, broadly set as “Reimagining the ambulances of the future”. To achieve this, the team had the possibility of inspecting a state-of-the art ambulance, riding in it, getting inputs from professionals such as paramedics and doctors, while having access to senior representatives from different divisions at Stryker. The team finally presented their solution via video broadcast in Zurich, and finished in second place.