Il Litorale, a new startup hot spot in Lugano

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Dimitri Loringett

18.04.2019
Il Litorale

To bring the worlds of academia and entrepreneurship together – that’s the goal of Il Litorale. The new off-campus facility of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), located in the heart of Lugano, is now open and ready to roll.

In Switzerland, top-class research and innovation is spread all over the country. Therefore, the potential for start-ups is huge across all Swiss cities. However, leveraging this strength to build up regional start-up ecosystems requires meeting points and places where innovation becomes visible to spark the interest in entrepreneurial activities.

With Il Litorale (Italian for “seaboard”), Lugano has now such a space – a 300 m2 flat located in the historical Maghetti district, offering an event lounge, an open shared workspace for up to 15 people, a small makerspace lab, a kitchen with a coffee machine, and six discreet office spaces with two desks each. All of these are available for rent or for any activities that involve the registered members of Il Litorale.

Il Litorale Inauguration

On April 11, USI officially celebrated the opening of Il Litorale with over fifty invited guests – city authorities, citizens, business executives, university stakeholders and members of the academic community, thus embodying the rationale behind the project, which aims at being the place where the academic and entrepreneurial worlds can gather in a friendly and informal environment, to develop an ecosystem that creates value by the effects of "cross-fertilisation”.

The goals behind the project are essentially three: (1) getting the academic community to "move out" of the campus and, at the same time, to "bring in" potential stakeholders from the region and have them interact in a physical location, off-campus; (2) being closer to the entrepreneurial context and providing students and graduates a privileged access to such, through a strategically located outpost in the city centre; and (3) creating a so-called "community of practice" to enable cross-fertilization and create value, fostering thus economic and social development in the region.

To reach these goals, USI has chosen a new approach, that is to engage more closely with its students by entering a formal agreement with Match Strategies.The association founded by students and graduates of USI will be responsible for the 'community building' at Il Litorale on behalf of the university.

Anyone on board with the rationale behind Il Litorale can join by membership, free of charge, and be kept informed about events, courses, and all things happening to and at the community of practice. Likewise, workspaces are rented to individuals or entities that are committed to contribute to the community. For instance, ks/cs Communication Switzerland – the National association of commercial communication – will soon have a space at Il Litorale, in view of the research projects it is conducting with the USI Faculty of Communication Sciences.

Further information about Il Litorale at: www.litorale.usi.ch

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