KT - CESP
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. In 2020, the KT Group had to move most of these events to an online format due to the pandemic, but they continued to attract significant interest.
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.