Complaining about how everything is better elsewhere is a standard topic of all European tech and innovation conferences, and comparing your own city to Silicon Valley is what many can’t stop talking about. At Lift Basel 2015, we’ll try to break that pattern and take the debate one step forward. With the epidemiologist and entrepreneur Dr. Marcel Salathé, who recently arrived back in Switzerland after a great success story in the US and Scott Smith, the acclaimed futures research- and strategic design expert who settled down in Europe only weeks ago, we’ll discuss how their immigration into “old Europe” changed their perspectives and what game-changing factors they see for Europe’s future. They’ll be joined by Dr. Mona Boyé of Alsace BioValley and by Prof. Dr. Ernst Hafen, former president of ETH Zurich, who also started his scientific career in the US and has been relentlessly innovating in Europe ever since. The three will debate European futures, strategies and scenarios for acceleration as well as pressing issues for scientists and startups and will try to draft a first version of a future in which the confluence of bio, tech and business brings good old Europe back on the way to true progress and lasting success.
