Vittorio Mischi is Professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFT) - the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - where he teaches Entrepreneurial Finance for the fifth academic year. According to Vittorio the real name of his course is „how to achieve your dreams with other people's money“: „I am helping scientists to translate a technological idea into a spin-off, to become an entrepreneur, and to start their own company.“ Students work with Vittorio for 14 weeks to make their dreams come true, and build REAL companies.
Vittorio points out that „people in my program have already decided they want to become entrepreneurs“. „Most of them already have a patent or a patent pending. They probably have worked on their ‚idea’ for 2, 3 or 5 years.“ Vittorio works with his students in order to consolidate an offering that is good for a potential investor: „At that point they already have a company that requires only water (=money) and they can go out and start their company based on their technology. The last step from inside the university to outside is the one that I help them do.“
There are 6000 undergraduate students, 1400 Ph.D. candidates and 250 laboratories at the EPFL: „It’s an enormous playground with a potential of around 50 new ideas every year that could become startups“, says Vittorio. Out of the 9 projects he had last year, four won McKinsey’s Virtual Venture Competition. Vittorio adds: „It’s not my merit, but it’s a correlation.“
Vittorio finds he is in „a blessed situation“: „The area where I am is a lot like Silicon Valley in the 70s with Stanford UC as a very strong concentration point of technology. There’s a lot of capital available in Canton de Genève and in Canton de Vaux. There’s probably the highest concentration of high net worth individuals and billionaires in the world and a high concentration of corporations headquarters.“ It’s Vittorio’s aim „to be one of the enablers of a virtual circle of entrepreneurship which could create quite an interesting economic incentive and economic dynamic for that part of Switzerland and Europe in general.“
Please note that Viktoria also interviewed Peter Vogel, Suhas Gopinath, Rico Wyder and Farley Duvall at the StartUpCamp Switzerland. More interviews will follow in the days to come @ www.tiburon-tv.com.
