Impact Hub Zurich celebrates a ten-year anniversary

Impact Hubs provide their communities worldwide with a platform to collaborate across organisations, cultures and generations to innovate to solve pressing societal challenges. They offer services in the form of co-working places, meeting rooms, events and startup support programmes to foster entrepreneurship, sustainable development, innovation and new forms of work.

There are over 100 impact Hubs globally, consisting of over 16,000 members. Six hubs at eight locations are based in Switzerland, which since 2019 became part of the Impact Hub Switzerland association with a Swiss-wide community of more than 1300 active members, 100 team members and over 1’620 jobs created annually by the community. Initiatives such as the “Circular Economy Transition” (CET), Climathons and the Swiss-wide Covid-19-hackathon and incubation program #VersusVirus run across the different locations.

Ten years Impact Hub Zurich and global prominence
Impact Hub Zurich launched in 2011, and it has since formed a thriving innovation ecosystem with two co-working spaces, Colab and Viadukt. It also runs activities at the innovation space Kraftwerk together with Engagement Migros, ewz and digitalswitzerland. These ölocations have welcomed 150‘000 visitors during the past decade.

Before the corona crisis, Impact Hub Zurich’s (IHZ) had grown to 1000 members, making it the leading Impact Hub Worldwide. With 80 percent of its members developing solutions focusing on at least one UN Sustainable Development Goal, over 2000 new ventures have been established primarily in the fields of technology and sustainability, creating more than 5000 jobs. The organisation itself has also grown substantially, recoding over employees 100 that supported it in reaching 10 million revenues.

“The last ten years have taught us the power of community. When talented people come together and collaborate with a shared set of values, almost anything is possible. And actually, there is no alternative to collaboration if we want to tackle the big challenges of our and future generations,” said Christoph Birkholz, co-president and co-founder of Impact Hub Zurich.

Global retreat units 70 Impact Hub representatives
This year’s Global Retreat took place in Switzerland, hosting more than 70 people representing almost 40 Impact Hubs from 5 regions. “It was great to exchange ideas with colleagues from all over the world during this year’s Global Retreat in Switzerland, remarks Birkholz.

Today, the community and Swiss startup ecosystem will celebrate IHZ’s #Next10Years party from 9 PM in Zurich. Come one come all! Registration is still open.

(RAN)