Andrea Wehrli develops a business model for electronic waste recycling in India. Image: SNSF
In its first two years, the BRIDGE funding programme has financed 81 projects at the interface of basic science and science-based innovation. BRIDGE is supporting a project at Empa to recycle electrical waste in India. Andrea Wehrli and Jean-Charles Sanchez do not work in basic science nor do they have the capital to successfully bring their innovations to market. She is a graduate in environmental sciences, he is a successful doctor and they both have brilliant ideas. To boost finances and distribute risks, the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF and the Swiss Commission for Innovation Innosuisse have been running the BRIDGE programme since 2017. BRIDGE promotes the transfer of research results during the critical precompetitive phase, says Lothar Thiele, president of the BRIDGE steering committee in 2017 and 2018 as well as member of the Research Council of the SNSF. Thiele, professor of informatics at ETH, adds: "The unexpectedly high numbers of applications and their excellent quality shows that BRIDGE has closed an important gap between the funding schemes of Innosuisse and those of the SNSF." Andrea Wehrli is working at Empa and had been involved in a previous start-up.
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