CERN Entrepreneurship Student Programme
IdeaSquare is a close and natural partner of CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Group (KT), whose mandate it is to maximise the impact of CERN’s technologies on society.
IdeaSquare is a close and natural partner of CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Group (KT), whose mandate it is to maximise the impact of CERN’s technologies on society. A number of KT’s entrepreneurship-related events have been hosted and supported by IdeaSquare for many years.
One of these is CESP (CERN Entrepreneurship Student Programme) (2nd & 3rd editions) Since 2018, the KT group has organised CESP, a five-week programme where students from all over the world receive high-quality, hands-on training to develop entrepreneurial skills. During CESP, students work on building a venture based on a solution for the problem they identified. This programme offers the opportunity to work with technical experts from CERN. CESP is supported by the CERN & Society Foundation.
In 2019, as in 2018, 14 selected students were hosted at CERN and developed start-up ideas tackling the optimisation of greenhouses, detection of microplastics in wastewater, post-fire surveillance of wildfires, and industrial control and monitoring at construction sites. In 2020, the programme was held online. Based on feedback from previous years, a thematic focus on Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning was introduced, and applicants were asked to submit a project proposal under this overarching theme.