Last week, I spent a few days in Zurich with my sister Bethan who teaches at an international school in the city. As most of you are aware, Zurich is famous as one of the global centres of investment banking but it is also home to several universities including ETH Zurich, one of the leading higher education institutions in the World.
It is somewhere I have waited to visit for a long time ever since I started my degree in physics at Cardiff University nearly forty years ago as it is where one of my heroes, Albert Einstein, studied and then taught as a professor of theoretical physics. Specialising in science and technology, ETH has achieved a top ten ranking in a range of disciplines including biological sciences, chemistry, computer science engineering, mathematics and, of course, physics.
However, according to the start-up community website Sifted, ETH has also succeeded in transferring this academic knowledge from the laboratory to the marketplace and has become the most successful spin-out university in Europe with 545 businesses having been created by academics and researchers from the university.
