Hosted by: MIT Innovation Initiative & ETH Entrepreneur Club

On Thursday, September 20, five MIT students will step inside a glass-walled container located on the MIT campus to live and work for four days while tackling a societal challenge as part of InCube, a unique entrepreneurial hackathon co-organized by the MIT Innovation Initiative and ETH Entrepreneur Club, a student association based in Zurich, Switzerland.

Through problem finding, ideation, prototyping and pitching, the interdisciplinary team of students — ranging from undergraduates to PhD candidates studying computer science, economics, chemistry, biology and medical engineering at MIT — will live the full entrepreneurial journey and work towards finding an innovative solution to their given challenge that could be turned into a successful startup.

Intended to draw the public into the process, foster transparency and provide a platform for interactive engagement, the glass cube in Cambridge will be strategically placed on MIT’s North Court, facing the iconic Ray and Maria Stata Center.

Conceived by the ETH Entrepreneur Club, the InCube experiment is being conducted for the second time after the success of the first edition that took place in Zurich in 2017. This year, InCube is expanding to other locations across Switzerland, including Zurich, Bern and Crans-Montana, and in Cambridge where the MIT Innovation Initiative will host the first U.S.-based cube. Each of the cubes is being supported by a private company, institution or foundation that will define a problem for the team to solve. Stryker, a Fortune 500 medical technology firm based in Michigan and sponsor of the Cambridge cube, will unveil their challenge to the MIT students on day one of the hackathon.

InCube culminates with the students pitching their idea in front of a camera, which will be broadcast at the finale event in Zurich on Monday, September 24.