The city of Bern already combines a lot of different private and public institutions in the field of co-working, startup funding, entrepreneurship and innovation. As in many other places, these initiatives lack a common aggregator and often stand for themselves, which on one side makes funding and organizing a lot harder and on the other reduces their impact.
We as a team of locals think it is time to create a place where all the different stakeholders in the capital of Switzerland can benefit from a professional environment, yet focus on their own endeavor. We strongly believe that collaboration and professional support leads to success and we want to create a beacon in the main capital to show the people that change in the way we work together is possible and necessary.
The idea of building a hub in Bern came up during one of our monthly “leanlab sessions”, a monthly meetup where we share ideas and opinions around various topics. We realized how many people around us and in the local community really enjoyed this format and the exchange of ideas how they want to change the world. By building an Impact Hub in Bern, we want to canalize the positive energy of those creative minds and further fertilize this kind of exchange and open up this circle to others.
Our vision is to build a vibrant community of like-minded people, who want to fulfill their dreams by having a positive impact on the world in the center of Bern’s old town. The Hub should offer not only a workplace for the members of the community, but also a place to meet friends and tackle challenges in many different fields of today’s world. The Impact Hub Bern should serve as meeting place for people who share positive values, ideas and projects by combining the concepts of co-working, startup incubator, bar/café and event location as well as shared living room to one phenomenal habitat for thinkers and makers.
As a member of a global Hub Network, we envision members of the Impact Hub Bern exploring other hubs around the world, as well as us welcoming fellow Hubbers from all over the planet in the capital of Switzerland. For us, being a member of the global community is a big chance to leverage the network of the Impact Hub with and for our members, to further support them in their endeavors across the borders of Bern and our country.
The main job provider in Bern is the government and associated institutions. While we want to encourage people to join us in our Hub to change the world for the best, we want to have an impact on how the city of civil servants in Switzerland operates. We want to use the close access to Switzerland’s government bodies to strive for a better working democracy, which in the end will benefit each and every citizen and can be a role-model for many other states in the world. Other focus areas of our Hub will be “Mobility of the future”, “Food & Sustainability” and “Entrepreneurial Education” as we see that there are already a lot of initiatives or companies in this area. We emphasize that we are an inclusive community and those are just some of our focus areas to kick start the community. We know that the social entrepreneurship community is growing but is still in an early stage. We are eager to see which other areas will be the main focus points of the young entrepreneurs in our lovely city.
