Kickstart 2019: Festive review of a successful programme

SATW supported Kickstart's cybersecurity vertical 2019 as a knowledge partner. Four partnerships between established companies and start-ups have emerged from it. On 8 November, Kickstart celebrated the completion of its innovation support programme.

After an intensive four-month period of preparation and cooperation, the conclusion of the 2019 Kickstart programme was celebrated on 8 November. The closing ceremony at Kraftwerk Zurich with around 150 invited guests was all about innovative partnerships. Several partnerships were announced in each field; thus, Kickstart achieved its goals once again. Another highlight of the evening was the presentation of the book "Ecosystem Innovation". Umberto Annino, member of the Advsiory Board Cybersecurity of the SATW, wrote a contribution in which he recorded his experiences about open innovation in the field of cybersecurity (p.114).

Promoting partnerships

Cybersecurity was part of the programme for the first time this year. The fact that already four partnerships resulted is not self-evident and can be seen as a success. Together with the other partners, SATW celebrated the pleasing result. It was represented by Adolf J. Doerig, a member of SATW's board of directors and individual director. In his short speech at the beginning of the evening event, he gave the attendees an overview of SATW's current activities in this field. In addition to fundamental questions for Switzerland such as "Cyber in Space" or "Cyber Sovereignty", these include specific projects such as raising the awareness of the population and the economy, in particular SMEs, for an effective cybersecurity basic protection.

Innovative solutions to improve cybersecurity

One of the partnerships in the cybersecurity programme, the one between Swiss Mobiliar and the German start-up Statice, involves the use of synthetically generated data for the development of migration models. In this way, the personal identification data of customers can be protected and the work with and exchange of the data can be simplified and improved. Swiss Mobiliar also entered into a partnership with the Israeli start-up XM Cyber, in which the functions of the platform for cyber insurance are being tested. The other partnerships will focus on private-sector data innovation within the Swiss business ecosystem and the anonymization of data.