"Serve them, not you" — Interview with Anne Headon of the HUB Entrepreneurship and Innovation UNIL

06.07.2022 06:00, Tracy Woodley

During the summer months, we ask people who stimulate the Swiss startup ecosystem to provide the Venturelab community with food for thought, inspiration, and recommendations. Fo this year's Summer Series, we’ll be interviewing personnel from the country's leading higher education institutions about the diverse and unique programs available to support rising entrepreneurs across Switzerland. Anne Headon of HUB Entrepreneurship and Innovation UNIL kicks off the 2022 series with her insights on the entrepreneurship journey.

Name: Anne Headon 
Job title: Director, HUB Entrepreneurship and Innovation UNIL 
City: Lausanne 
What I do: I enhance entrepreneurial spirit within our community and support innovative projects that have a social and/or environmental impact. 

How would you summarize the mission of the HUB UNIL? 
The mission of the HUB is to enhance entrepreneurial spirit across the seven faculties of the University of Lausanne so that our graduates and community can contribute in a relevant and meaningful way to our region and to the future of our society. 

What are the main programs/resources offered by HUB UNIL?
The HUB’s activities are articulated around three pillars: 

• The Inspire pillar targets the UNIL community. Its objective is to foster and nurture entrepreneurial vocations.
• The Educate pillar targets UNIL students. Its objective is to offer and encourage courses around entrepreneurship for Bachelor's and Master's level students from all interested faculties, with a focus on impact entrepreneurship and social innovation.
• The Activate pillar targets all project holders. The objective is to support people with ideas and projects aligned with the institutional values of UNIL. Projects that have a social and environmental impact are therefore encouraged. The UCreate HUB activation programs are listed online. 

Who are the people behind HUB? What makes you all excited about supporting entrepreneurs? 
We are a small and committed team of six people who share a common vision and spirit: We are all passionate about contributing to a more sustainable future through supporting impact entrepreneurship and social innovation. We carry an “entrepreneurial mindset” ourselves. The HUB is less than three years old and we are writing every day our own story for the benefit of our community. We see ourselves as “bridge and trust builders”. We believe in the power of creating links between the expertise of different stakeholders to facilitate the social, economic, and environmental transition. 

We are also working in a fantastic ecosystem with projects of huge diversity, with motivated students, researchers, staff, and alumni. This diversity is really exciting! 

How can startup founders best benefit from the support of HUB?
The main program at UNIL is called UCreate, grounded in the belief the only way to have a sustainable future is to create it. 

UCreate offers a coherent path for project holders, with programs of different lengths designed around needs and project maturity levels (UCreate 1, UCreate 2, UCreate 3). Like other early-stage activation programs, the objective is to de-risk the project by confronting it with market reality, with a lot of focus on market validation through testing and prototyping. 

But UCreate differs from other programs in many ways : 

1. It focuses on projects with social and/or environmental impact 
2. It is truly inclusive and open to students, researchers, staff, and alumni of our community, with tech, low-tech or no-tech projects, as well as for-profit or not-for-profit projects. 
3. It also supports local social innovation projects. These projects embedded in a local community tend to be less scalable but we believe that they have interesting duplicable models. 
4. It is applied and tailored. Every participant works on own his/her own project, in the language of their choice (French or English), with a coach chosen according to their needs

From September 1st, 2022, our programs will also take place at the Villanova, a unique and creative collaboration space of 350 square meters in the heart of the campus. This will create a vibrant community of aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs, trainers, coaches, and mentors, and a new bridge between UNIL and society. 

Could you please share two or three success stories from UNIL that you are especially proud of? 
I will share two early-stage projects which have gone through our UCreate program, as they are very much in line with the values of the institution and the types of projects we support: 

Low Impact Food was founded by two researchers, one from the school of Biology at UNIL and one from EPFL. This project tackles the negative environmental impact of traditional protein sourcing. It offers an alternative source of protein by revalorizing co-products from local producers through the breeding of edible insects.
 
Musée à l’emporter was created by four students of the Faculté des lettres. This project tackles the issue of young students in rural communities with limited access to museums (travel is costly and complicated). It offers a new model of collaboration with museums which enables a unique experience in the classroom. This is a typical social innovation project aimed at reducing inequalities.

If you want to discover more success stories of experienced UNIL entrepreneurs, I invite you to look at our 100 Entrepreneurs UNIL. These ventures are also a reflection of the richness of our ecosystem and a source of pride. 

What are the key strengths of UNIL that make it a great place for entrepreneurs? 
Firstly, our ecosystem has a rich entrepreneurial history as Professor Pigneur and Dr. Osterwalder worked at our business school HEC. They designed concepts and published books (Value Proposition Design and Business Model Generation) which are among the most popular and widely-used books on entrepreneurship worldwide. 

Secondly, we benefit from the richness of our seven faculties and 17,500 students and researchers, at the heart of a vibrant and mature regional ecosystem.  

Finally, with the creation of the HUB and our UCreate programs, we have now a one-stop-shop where every idea or project holder can come, get support, and/or be redirected to the right place. Our new collaborative space at Villanova is also a concrete example of the support of the UNIL Rectorate for our mission and we are very grateful for that. 

All this creates a very special place for entrepreneurs at UNIL.  



Which fields of technology are the startups from UNIL especially strong in? 
Before answering this question, I need to stress that there is a symbolic hierarchy that tends to imply that technological innovation is of superior nature to other types of innovation. It is time that we put social innovation for example at the same level of importance if we want to solve the problems of tomorrow. 

This being said, given the strength of our faculty of medicine and biology and its close links with the CHUV, we have many projects in life science and biotech and a vibrant community of researchers in this field. 
 
Can you share a surprising moment observed during your work at HUB and what you learned from it? 
One of the many surprises since the creation of the HUB has been the high number of female entrepreneurs we have at UNIL and in our programs. They represent around 50% of our participants, and they have impressed me with their ability to take the lead and gather expertise around them. We need to keep encouraging female entrepreneurship in an ecosystem which is still very male dominated, whether on the entrepreneurs or the fund providers side. 

Which book would you recommend as a must-read for any aspiring entrepreneur?
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This book shows well how entrepreneurship is about testing your vision continuously with your potential customers or beneficiaries in order to adapt and adjust it in a context of limited time and resources. This book is ten years old and doesn’t incorporate recent thinking on sustainability, but it is very relevant to entrepreneurship as a process. 

What is a piece of key advice that you’d like to share with every new founder? 
Stay close to the ground, i.e. to the community you are serving. Understand their needs and their worldview. Understand how you will impact them, including potential negative externalities. 

Serve them, not you. 

Finally, what is your vision/prediction for the startup community in Switzerland?
I can see two main changes in this ecosystem: 

1. More collaborative: as our social and environmental problems are becoming more interdependent and systemic, the way we approach innovation will have to be systemic as well. This means we cannot keep working in silos and will have to learn to work together and deconstruct potential prejudice. I’ve seen some encouraging signs, but it will require trust and time.  
2. More attention and financial support for impact entrepreneurship and social innovation, which is very positive. New support structures are being set at cantonal and national levels, which should encourage the emergence of these projects and increase their success rate. 

In both cases, I believe that UNIL has a leading role to play in building a more collaborative and sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

Anything else you’d like our readers to know?
On the famous question what would you recommend to students ?, I have recently heard a keynote speaker saying at a big conference: “Make money until you are 40 years old and then use it to have a positive impact”. I totally disagree. We don’t have 20 years in front of us and one doesn’t change posture that easily at 40 years old. My advice would be totally different: if you want to have a positive impact on our society, start now, even on a small scale. If there is a problem you want to solve, it has never been a better time for students to taste entrepreneurship and to experiment with the support of the ecosystem. This will be of value to society but also to yourself, whether you become an entrepreneur or not. 

 
Available support for UNIL spin-offs:  
Hub Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Venture Kick
Innosuisse Start-up Trainings 

Connect and follow:
LinkedIn 
UNIL Hub Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Venture Kick
Venturelab

Twitter 
@UNIL
@VentureKick
@Venturelab_ch

Notable startups founded by UNIL alumni: