Guest Post by John Cannon, Communications Specialist, swissnex San Francisco
It’s something we hear a lot at swissnex San Francisco: “We’ve been to your events, and we keep coming back. But we’re still not quite sure—what exactly is swissnex?”
The short answer is that we connect the dots between North America and Switzerland, with the goal of bringing out the best that each has to offer to everyone’s benefit. “We’re like doctors,” said Executive Director Christian Simm at a recent monthly discussion that we co-host with a group called ScienceOnline Bay Area. “We feel the pulse of Silicon Valley and Switzerland, and we do transfusions of ideas between the two places.”
History
Like many countries, Switzerland deploys science and technology counselors around the world, usually to centers of science policy—places like Washington, D.C., and Tokyo. In the late 1990s, Simm took just such a position—only this time, the base wasn’t a policy center.
The San Francisco Bay Area had grown into a world hub of innovation, and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Education and Research saw the need for a science diplomat outside of the traditional policy arena. On top of advocating for Swiss science and technology abroad, Simm found that Swiss companies, universities, scientists, and artists all wanted to be plugged into this vibrant region. And their counterparts in the Bay Area were just as keen to connect with Switzerland.
Simm began to envision a new kind of science diplomacy, one that would bring together exciting ideas and players from all disciplines and encourage and nurture the collaboration and innovation that materialized, to benefit not just the Swiss, but everyone involved. His vision became a reality in 2003 when swissnex San Francisco officially opened as an annex of the Swiss consulate. Now there are outposts in four other cities around the world: Bangalore, Boston, Shanghai, and Singapore.
Our broad mission is reflected in the diversity of our team. As a self-described “recovering physicist,” Simm calls his team members “free electrons.” In physics, free electrons have broken away of their staid and predictable atomic orbits, and can react to the forces acting upon them. In a sense, that’s what happens at swissnex San Francisco, where our people come from backgrounds as disparate as hospitality and physics, pediatric oncology and music journalism: We figure out which trends are the most magnetic, which ideas are the most electric, and we make connections.
Startup and Innovation Services
“Silicon Valley really is the place where entrepreneurs are bred on a daily basis,” says Gioia Deucher, Head of Startup Services. “For companies coming from Switzerland, this is really the perfect plug for them to reach a global market.”
Swiss startups compete to gain access to our CTI Start-up U.S. Market Entry Camp for three months. In addition to a desk in our downtown-San Francisco office, they get a stipend, targeted introductions with potential investors and collaborators, and workshops to help them grow their companies. Past residents have included companies that are trying to perfect existing technology, such as Jilion, developers of what they hope will be the Web’s most reliable HTML5 video player. Campers also come up with entirely new solutions, like Dacuda, creators of the world’s first scanning mouse.
Interdisciplinary Events
Designed to be both timely and substantive, swissnex events feature experts from Switzerland and around the globe. For example, a Swiss team blending art and science installed a virtual forest in our event space. As part of the Bay Area Science Festival, we brought together criminologists and fingerprint experts from the San Francisco Police Department to find out if fingerprints really tell the truth. And we partnered with UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and CERN to host an interactive evening centered on the Higgs Boson.
The San Francisco Police Department was out in force for an event examining the science and folklore of fingerprints.
Science writer Paul Preuss of Lawrence Berkeley wrote to the swissnex team afterward: “My sincere thanks and appreciation for the hospitality, creativity, and wonderful spirit you brought to this event.” He added, “swissnex San Francisco once more upheld its reputation for intellectual excitement and sophistication.”
These occasions are really about creating the space for interactions to occur, in the hopes that “free electrons,” whether from our team or the community, will make fortuitous connections.
Higher Education
It’s no secret that colleges and universities can be some of the best places to nurture innovation. Through mandates with institutions of higher education from all over Switzerland, swissnex San Francisco helps schools leverage the power of social media, and our communications staff gets the word out about the amazing science happening at topflight Swiss schools like EPFL and ETH Zürich.
swissnex held a social media study tour for Swiss institutions of higher education, which included a stop at the Twitter campus.
Our University Affairs team organizes alumni events to help Swiss alumni connect with their alma maters, and we periodically host representatives from Swiss higher education, who join us for up to a year as members of the swissnex team, helping further their home institutions’ internationalization goals and cross-pollinating with their counterparts at Bay Area schools.
Examining the nextrends
Just as the focus of business and art and science and technology all change at rates faster than anywhere else in the world here in Silicon Valley, so our activities morph to keep pace. But that doesn’t mean we just determine which way the wind is blowing and hop on for the ride. We identify the first breezes of change to better inform our audiences here and in Switzerland.
swissnex San Francisco’s trend-scouting site nextrends debuted in June 2012.
That’s why we started a trend-scouting website called nextrends, where members of our team, who are acutely in tune with the pulse of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, leverage what they know to capture the essence of the region. In many ways, nextrends is a microcosm of what swissnex is—a repository of ideas and expertise, providing the latest analysis of trends and ideas that don’t always make the leap across the continent and ocean between here and Switzerland. Every two weeks, our subscribers receive reports on subjects like online education, the sharing economy, and local food entrepreneurship, to name just a few.
Hand-in-hand with its neutral position on the world stage, Switzerland has long been a country committed to unbiased exchange between groups—groups that on the surface seem to have little in common. Yet, innovation and solutions to problems often spring from this melding of ideas. It’s that spirit we strive to channel at swissnex, as we continue to connect the dots.
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John Cannon is a science writer and a communications specialist with swissnex San Francisco.
