The Joy of Collaboration - When Swiss students meet Israeli startups

“I got something that I could not have afforded and that money cannot buy”, said Zeev Russak, CEO of the Israeli biotech startup Infiniplex. Zeev and his team participated in a student-startup program, which brought together Swiss students from the Msc of Digital Business Administration of the University of Applied Sciences (BFH) and Israeli startups from the health tech sector.

As part of “Live Cases” - a central component of BFH’s Master's program – the students worked with eight diverse Israeli HealthTech start-ups, to eventually provide market strategy suggestions about the countries in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). The program was coordinated by the Science and Innovation Office in Israel, in partnership with “8400 The Health Network”, that facilitated the selection and connection to the start-ups.

After months of digital exchange, the students travelled to Tel Aviv in May 2023 to meet their start-up partners in person as well as visit Israel and its vibrant ecosystem.

To celebrate the completion of the project, students and startups all met together for a concluding event in Tel Aviv, in the presence of the Ambassador of Switzerland to Israel, Urs Bucher and keynote speaker, Dan Schwartzman. There, some of the students and startups came on stage as well to share their experience and learnings. Zeev had shared that he gained something priceless from collaborating with students, which have gone above and beyond to create real value for his startup. Karen, a BFH student, and her group showcased their remarkable dedication as they conducted an in-depth competitor analysis. By comparing 30 competitors in the DACH region their team demonstrated the transformative impact that students can have when given the opportunity to contribute to real-world projects. Zeev would not have been able to gain access to this type of information on his own or gain crucial cultural insights about the DACH region without the students.

These and more experiences make it clear that both students and startups could benefit in the long term from such an exchange. We hope they both take the important learnings from this project!