The CERN Entrepreneurship Student Programme

The CERN Entrepreneurship Student Programme is a great opportunity for Master's level entrepreneurship students to develop as entrepreneurs in residence at CERN, and was hosted or the first time in 2018. Step-by-step, the students got to explore and evaluate technologies under the supervision and coaching of CERN experts. Trying themselves as entrepreneurs in residence, they moved from theory to practice and worked on assessing the commercial potential in technologies from CERN, developing a business plan and prototypes.

The second CESP took place during the summer of 2019. 14 Master’s students came to CERN for a five-week residency, where they received coaching and training on high-tech venture creation as well as worked alongside experienced CERN knowledge transfer professionals, identifying and evaluating exploitable technologies with the aim of developing concepts for new ventures. The result was four potential startup companies. 

The third edition of CESP will be held the summer of 2020. CESP is a CERN & Society Foundation project, funded by Strangeworks and Arconic Foundation. 

Training through the BIC network

The Business Incubation Centres (BICs) host various training and education opportunities such as hackathons, expert meetings and mentoring of startups.

Medtech:Hack - CERN Medical Technology Hackathon

The medical technology hackathon is an innovation competition where teams solve topical problems in the medical field pitched by healthcare and industry partners.

NTNU Screening Week

Every year Master's level students from NTNU School of Entrepreneurship visit CERN to explore market opportunities for CERN technologies, with the aim of developing concepts for new ventures.

Entrepreneurship training at IdeaSquare

CERN Knowledge Transfer collaborates with CERN IdeaSquare. IdeaSquare is connecting curious minds to accelerate ideas through collaboration, R&D prototyping, and experimental innovation, and many innovation and entrepreneurship related courses are held at IdeaSquare: 

• Challenge Based Innovation (CBI) is a project course where multidisciplinary student teams and their instructors collaborate with researchers at CERN to discover novel solutions for the future of humankind. The projects are an elaborate mixture, where the technologies derived from research at CERN meet societal, human-driven needs.
• THE Port humanitarian hackathon is annually hosted at IdeaSquare. Participants are grouped into multidisciplinary teams and balanced with a mix of professions, ages, nationalities, and genders to tackle humanitarian challenges.