What a week for our team! 6 intensive days in Silicon Valley just wrapped-up, but the long list of insightful takeaways will accompany us for months to come.
MeduSoil, a Swiss EPFL spin-off specializing in bio-binders for sustainable construction, was among the winners of the IMD Startup Challenge and took part in a week-long Silicon Valley immersion. The experience connected the team with key U.S. industry players, regulators, and innovators to refine its go-to-market strategy and expand its international presence.
The Swiss-born materials company, which delivered its first product batches outside of Switzerland in 2022, joined the IMD EMBA team for six days of visits and workshops across Palo Alto, Stanford, and San Francisco. The timing couldn’t have been better: the construction industry is global in scope but deeply local in execution, relying on regional stakeholders for production, supply, and deployment. The immersion week offered a unique opportunity to gain first-hand insights into major Bay Area infrastructure projects, test customer-centric approaches, and validate regulatory pathways.
One of our customers, with experience in mega projects on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean once told us that “when it comes to construction materials there exist two schools of thought: the first one says that all materials are banned until their deployment is proven safe for the environment while the second suggests that materials can be deployed until proven harmful for the environment”. The first approach is the de-facto one applied in European markets and with this respect MeduSoil’s products received in 2022 certification under CEN/TR 17105:2017 norm which rules on the ecotoxicity of construction products. The regulatory landscape is changing rapidly in the US too, and that was a key takeaway for our team. We learned how the Biden Inflation Reduction Act is expected impact drastically the future of sustainable infrastructure development while in the state of California, new legislation was enacted in 2021 to slash cement emissions by 40%.
Among the stakeholders connected with our team during this week in Silicon Valley were state regulators, environmental agencies dealing with the key domains of coastal erosion and flood protection as well as general contractors. Some of the mega-projects, such as the SFO airport runway extension or the upgrade of the Embarcadero Seawall, will require extensive liquefaction protection works or shoreline erosion protection in the years to come. The insights gathered from customers and key opinion leaders allow our team to shape a new, global vision of its product and impact.
Overall, this has been an immersion week that offered opportunities for professional development and for peer-learning. Our team visited the Apple Park in Cupertino, and the Headquarters of ServiceNow and Logitech, among others. We participated to tailored and intensive training with IDEO in San Francisco, a design firm and discovered the “tribes of Silicon Valley” from the viewpoint of Chuck Darrah, a Silicon Valley-based anthropologist. Finally, we took volunteering work at RAFT a non-profit organism which supports education for low- and middle-income schools.
In case you missed it:
Team MeduSoil receives a Innosuisse project worth CHF 700’000D Silicon Valley immersion 🚀🌉
