MEET ERICH THALER!
SCIENCEPRENEURSHIP is an alternative career path for researchers they most smoothly embark on with committed supporters. One of them is doubtless Erich Thaler, working within the International Relations Department of the University of Basel as Senior Manager Networks and Global Partnerships. Through being actively involved in a bilateral support programme for sciencepreneurs, Erich got a good view of the kind of help that proves especially helpful for founders up to successfully entering a new market abroad. Our paths crossed during a webinar on sciencepreneurship support EURAXESS Luxembourg organized in July 2022 in the framework of the EURAXESS Hubs project. When we recently met Erich in Switzerland, we seized the opportunity to tap into his extensive experience and are glad to share selected insights here with you.
Erich, tell us more about "AIT-SASBI", a training programme that embraces the concept of immersion into ecosystems underlying the "EURAXESS Startup Hub Tours"
ET: How to summarize 20 years of cooperation in research and innovation with countries from outside Europe? The Swiss government, at the beginning of the new millennium, started to strengthen bilateral cooperation with BRICS countries*. Researchers from all Swiss Higher Education Institutions were invited to take stock of their existing BRICS partnerships and contribute to calls that were launched subsequently. For implementing and further developing these partnership programs, Universities in Switzerland with specific expertise and interest in one of the targeted world regions were identified as program implementing agencies or leading houses and mandated by the Swiss Ministry for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) for this task in 4-years-period performance agreements.
I will take out the example of South Africa and the further development of the program into the Swiss – African Research and Innovation Program (SARECO) with program sub-tracks for science and business innovators (AIT SABII 2016-2020 and 2020-2024). The driving force behind all these program tracks was to create an enabling environment for researchers and sciencepreneurs to increase collaboration and stimulate joint publication as well as business development out of research results. At the start of the program, it was not clear to us, the implementing team, how we should really foster “academia – industry partnership”. It was a tough task. We looked at possible involvement of industry. Very soon, we recognized that with the funding available and the diversity of actors involved “industry”, like big companies that you would immediately think of as first partners to approach, where not at all interested. The program that we were building up was set to strengthen existing research partnerships and to develop and try out new forms of collaborative instruments. When cutting back on our “industry” ambitions and refocusing on our core business as a university, i.e. training students and researchers and make them fit for a highly dynamic and innovation demanding job market we started to receive encouraging feedback from university partners in Switzerland and Africa but also from industry foundations and academic associations as well as from entrepreneurship support organisations.
Today, we look back at almost 4 entire 4-year-program periods for dedicated start-up support and a number of roughly 400 sciencepreneurs that went through it. At this stage, we are very curious to know how all these 400 companies have been doing.
How do we go about the training of start-ups that have been joining our program?
We are lucky to see manifold training offers unfold at university but also at regional and national level. In Switzerland, for example, the Gebert-Rüf-Foundation has brought into existence a support platform called "Venturelab" that has been building up competition schemes all across Switzerland and their universities to identify and take forward best business cases among students. In South Africa, the publicly funded Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education Unit (EDHE) at Universities South Africa (USAf) has been proceeding in a similar way. At each of the 26 public universities, so-called Economic Activation Offices (EAOs) were established with the aim to monitor and support start-up development. On the basis of these developments in various places our task then was to create a space for the best start-ups to come together, to learn from each other and to hear about specificities of the respective market environment. This space was created by our Annual Conferences that have been convening program stakeholders for taking stock of current developments but were also offering FORUM, the pitching platform for start-ups. In a two-pronged approach, African start-ups are pre-selected by their national start-up funding agency or a regional hub university to present the prototype of their business model to an expert jury at the FORUM assessing the fit for the Swiss market. Independently of their success at this pitching round, all presenting start-ups are invited afterwards into a collegial feedback session with their Swiss counterparts who are present – on-site or online – during the pitches.
These peer-to-peer exchanges were helping start-ups a lot from both Switzerland and Africa to gain a foothold in the respective target markets. Their commitment to go abroad and explore international markets has also been contributing to progressively building up a community of like-minded business people. The establishment of member groups on social media have been supporting this team building across different business fields and countries.
Based on your experience as coordinator on the part of University of Basel, what do you consider as crucial when it comes to implementing a support programme for entrepreneurial researchers with ambitions of developing foreign markets?
ET: Partners are crucial for building up and for implementing such programs. Partners in your home country and partners in the target countries. Let me give you a concrete example. We had a young researcher from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in our program who was developing animal observation devices. In Switzerland, he received all support for his research and business case development. In South Africa, the Swiss Embassy reached out to the University of Cape Town (UCT) because they knew of similar interests in their research community. And, what is more and what was crucial for the project development, UCT researchers were enjoying long-term relations with wildlife park rangers who are the entry point for any study that a researcher would wish to execute in the field of wildlife observation. Partnerships were set, the funding confirmed, the real life observation and study work could start. Many more examples are worth telling. We have started to collect these business cases and showcase them in an interactive map on the SARECO website and database. Program participants can visit this site and look at inspiring examples of collaboration.
Where could university representatives look for collaboration partners to make such a programme a success both for the contributing institutions and for its beneficiaries, the researchers?
You always have to define “success” first. What do you want to achieve? You and your partners. You with your partners. You will quickly discover that “success” is multifaceted and for each level of success you will need to bring in different types of players. Very recently, for example, Innovation Offices of Swiss Universities came into game. With them, the approach to industry has moved again to a different level. Discussions about funding rounds, investor meetings, etc. can take place now because the partners are there.
Where do you see the value of the EURAXESS network in sciencepreneurship support?
ET: When researchers receive access to entrepreneurship skills and best practices in business model building at different stages of their own business faring, independently of their location, becoming introduced to the top-level sciencepreneur community at each location they would go to (as visiting scholar or within their own career development as a full-time researcher) – this is where I would see the value of the EURAXESS network come to fruition. Experiences made in Switzerland to build up start-up support ecosystems (Venturelab, Directors’ Club of Innovation Offices) and Africa (EDHE in South Africa, the Afrilabs Impact Hub – Network spanning over 40 countries in Africa, and many more to mention) could serve as catalyzer for an EURAXESS sciencepreneurship support hub model.
You haven't heard about the "EURAXESS STARTUP HUB"? Discover the initiative as well as the tools and events for researchers it generated so far.
*[ed.: The "BRICS" countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - are considered the five foremost emerging economies in the world.]