Industry challenges come to EPFL classroom

You're a master's or PhD student at EPFL. A head of innovation from one of EPFL’s industrial partners has just put a problem in front of your team: redesign a product line for circularity, automate production at scale, or find a new application for a technology the company already owns and has never used this way. Would you be up to the challenge?

Starting this semester, the Open Innovation Lab is a new course, that offers master's or PhD student the opportunity to work in a small interdisciplinary team, with a real client and fourteen weeks to turn their problem into something they can act on. They'd have until December to hand over a report including an executive summary, and then present the strategy to executives in the company, getting first-hand experience at defending their ideas outside EPFL’s ivory tower.

“This class is designed to bring young engineers out of their comfort zone. In industry, demonstrating non-technical skills, such as understanding one’s role in value creation, is a clear differentiator in determining one’s role in a company,” says Cudré-Mauroux, SICPA CTO and co-lecturer.

While the course is taught within the Master in Management, Technology and Entrepreneurship, it is open to students from all EPFL programs. And they will not go unguided through this challenge but carefully mentored along the way. The Innovation Lab will be driven, and not taught in the traditional sense, by Cudré-Mauroux and EPFL lecturer Enrico Bergamini.

Bergamini, whose path has taken him from aerospace engineering to the automotive industry and back to academia, sees the course as a logical conjugation of EPFL’s ecosystem: brilliant students and cutting-edge companies. “It’s where the magic happens,” as he puts it. “And the networking element is an essential part of the course. This is a foot in the door for the future: a semester project, a Master thesis or even a first job experience after graduating.”

And while EPFL students are accustomed to working on hard, open-ended problems in class, someone has always known what a good answer looks like. Here nobody does: not the lecturers, and not the companies bringing the problems. “Whether anything happens to a team's recommendation depends entirely on whether it is good enough, and specific enough, to survive a room full of people with budgets and implementation experience,” adds Cudré-Mauroux.

And herein lies the crux of the six challenges: They go beyond purely technical problems with a clean outcome. Instead, students will be guided on how to manage the solution through the human and organizational complexity of a company. And, perhaps most importantly, how to take responsibility for the decisions that have led to their solution.

Send your motivation letter by September 4^th, 2026