Freedom to fail

The start-up Pleasant Plants, founded by Jenny Held and Alexander Smirnow, develops miniature automated gardens that can be kept on a shelf or on the kitchen table. A peek into one of these techpacked wooden boxes might reveal herbs or cherry tomatoes, both of which can easily be grown by even the least green-fingered users. The price of the automated plant production assistant – including the rooting medium, seeds, nutrients, user manual and power cord – is 299 Swiss francs. Once installed, it ensures plants receive the right amount of water, light and nutrients. The start-up recently delivered the first batch to customers and is now looking at ways to reduce costs.

Held has a background in physics. She studied at King’s College London and ETH Zurich before taking her doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, where she modelled the dynamics of phytoplankton. Her doctorate, which she completed in 2019, was always her overriding goal – yet somehow she ended up going into business as well. “The strawberry plants in my flat share were always wilting because nobody bothered to take care of them,” she says. “More generally, I also felt frustrated by the harmful and inefficient ways in which food is produced.” Together with a few friends, the co-founders began building automatic irrigation systems at home.

In the Student Project House, they finally found the infrastructure and support they needed to take their idea of automated food production further. It took just under two years to propel their product from idea to delivery. During that time, the physics graduate learned the ropes of automated plant cultivation and how to organise product design, marketing and delivery.

ETH Zurich has a mission to produce "future-ready graduates" – people with the critical-thinking skills and courage to venture into unknown territory and successfully solve whatever problems they may encounter. "With technology evolving at such a rapid pace, our graduates will need to reinvent themselves multiple times over the course of their careers," says ETH Rector Sarah Springman. "Our job is to prepare them as best we can."

The Student Project House is key to achieving this goal. Initiated by Lino Guzzella, the former President and Rector of ETH, it is one of the key strategic projects with which ETH is seeking to future-proof its teaching against technological and social change. In October this year, ETH Zurich opened a second location on the Zentrum campus. A combin­ation of think tank and workshop, it provides students with everything they need to put their ideas into practice, build prototypes and take their projects to the next level.

By stripping out the boilers from a former district heating plant, the university opened up over 1,200 square metres of space over five floors. This was divided up into workshops and workspaces and kitted out with equipment such as 3D printers and laser cutters. A team of professional coaches – each with their own personal experience of innovation projects – provides support to the project teams, and the Student Project House is now open to anyone who is enrolled at ETH and who has successfully passed their first-year examinations.

"Our idea was to create a think-tank environment that encourages and empowers students to experiment and to pursue projects that may not be directly related to their degree programme," says Lucie Rejman, who heads up the Student Project House. It was therefore decided that students would not be granted academic credits towards their course, says Rejman: "Students come to the Student Project House because they are passionate about an idea and want to develop something of their own. And it’s vital they have the freedom to fail without that affecting their degree programme." By the same token, the idea itself plays no role in whether people are accepted into the Student Project House.

This freedom encourages students to be bold, even in situations that feel unfamiliar – and Jenny Held will never forget what a revelation that realisation was: “In normal studies, you often have the feeling you’re going to find the optimum solution – or at least that if you spend enough time figuring things out, you’ll eventually come up with something that works.” But the Student Project House showed her that this approach is often not enough for a project to succeed.

She recalls multiple situations in which she had to make decisions based on limited knowledge: “You can spend ages wondering which technology is best, or what customers are really looking for. But it’s much better to try things out and ask potential customers for feedback. I’ve gained the confidence to just go ahead and do things.”

Held quickly learned the importance of teamwork: “You eventually reach a point where you no longer have the necessary expertise. Working in a team rapidly forces you to adopt a language that can be understood by people from very different fields.”

Ivan Hanselmann works as a coach in the Student Project House and assists Jenny Held and her team. Having studied business administration himself, he argues that the experiences Held describes are crucial to turning innovations into successful businesses, and that they mould a mindset that is not easily taught.

For this reason, Hanselmann sees his role as very different to that of a traditional lecturer. "Although he does occasionally pass on knowledge, he says he spends most of his time simply trying to introduce the project teams to new learning situations. He cites innovation research showing that outside input is what makes entrepreneurs more successful: “My goal is to give the project teams as much of this input as possible – for example, by arranging for them to meet industry experts or other teams.” He argues that this input can still be valuable even if it doesn’t have an obvious, direct use: “The more input they get, the more they start to think. And then they reflect on what they really want from their project, what the key function is, and what inputs will help them on their way."

The way in which students learn in the Student Project House offers a groundbreaking model for the future of teaching, says Springman. The Rector believes it is important not only to foster technical skills and methodological competence, but also to promote students’ personal and social skills. These include being able to motiv­ate themselves and others, communicate clearly, cope with change and recognise their own limits.

The Student Project House is but one of many projects to pursue this goal. Others include ETH Week and ETH Singapore Month – both of which provide a similar opportunity for students from a range of academic departments to work in interdisciplinary teams and seek solutions to current challenges. And there is also the student-led initiative Prisma, which aims to expand the use of interdisciplinary project work in existing study programmes. To strengthen these kinds of formats, their administration was recently placed under the aegis of the Rectorate. In add­ition to these flagship initiatives, there are many other similar projects, both big and small, which form an integral part of the curriculum of almost all ETH degree programmes.

Nevertheless, there is one aspect in which they all differ from the Student Project House. “Our projects don’t come to an end when the semester does,” says Hanselmann. It often takes longer than a semester for someone to truly experience the value of iterative learning and entrepreneurship, he explains. What’s more, some of the projects in the Student Project House originated from curricular project work but continued to exert a hold on their creators long after their study programme had moved on.
Springman sees this as a positive sign: “When I watch project teams at work in the Student Project House or similar settings, I see that keen curiosity you often get from first-year students, right down to their body language! That level of motivation is perfect for learning.” She would like to see more of this atmosphere in the curricular courses as well, but unfortunately the teaching canon often leaves far too little room for more active learning.

Ironically, the pandemic may have given her hopes a boost, now that mandatory remote learning has led many more lecturers to record their lectures. In future, this may mean that students are able to acquire some of the subject matter outside of the lecture hall, thereby freeing up valuable teaching time for forms of learning in which students have an opportunity to venture into unfamiliar territory.

Find out more about the Student Project House.