"Womxn who start up - bring your ideas to life" is an initiative of the Innovation Office of the University of Bern to promote diversity in the field of academic entrepreneurship. We support individuals from different personal and professional backgrounds, identities and experiences to have their research make a tangible impact in society.
To achieve this common goal, we aim to connect and inspire University of Bern members, and provide them with first-hand practical advice through events, networks, and personal discussions.
Furthermore, our initiative engages in a better future with fairer conditions for all by taking practical steps towards minimizing biases in funding decisions and supporting the ecosystem in collaboration with similarly oriented initiatives. WWSU also advocates for this topic in different contexts and on various occasions of public interest and academic innovation promotion.
With WWSU you can:
- Exchange ideas and get inspired by others changemakers, innovators and supporters.
- Expand your resources and skillset through interactive workshops and formats and explore your entrepreneurial potential.
- Let your unique perspective enrich new approaches and help build a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem that makes academic innovation and knowledge mobilization through entrepreneurship more widely accessible.
Our origins
In 2021, only 15% of spin-off founders at Swiss universities and research institutes were female, according to the FEMSPIN Report. On genderqueer entrepreneurship, we have not yet been able to find specific research data. With "Womxn who start up", we want to help increase this share in the future.
Our brand
The goal of our program is to promote diversity in the field of academic entrepreneurship. Since our inception, we have found that there are several gaps in achieving true equality in this field. This is why by using the term "womxn" we would like to address so-far underrepresented individuals and groups, and include a more expansive, non-binary view of gender which also takes aspects of intersectionality into account.
Our inspiration for our choice of wording was the University of California at Irvine (UCI).
Join the community!
Have you ever had a business idea, but didn’t know where to start or how to handle it? We have formed a LinkedIn group to share and receive insights, challenges and opportunities at all stages of the innovation process.
Partner
