5 YEARS OF SPARK WORKS - HEAR FROM OUR FOUNDERS

It’s been five years of Spark Works. Hear from our founding partners as they reflect on this milestone…

When I look back at five years of Spark Works so much has happened:

• We started off at our small Spark Labs office at ETH and are now occupying a beautiful creative space at the heart of Zurich by Paradeplatz.

• We began as three people with a shared vision and now employ about 30 people across the globe.

• We had one project that would barely pay our bills for the first few months and have since worked with about 30 private and public organisations across industries.
• The challenges we have been tackling with them range from ‘the future of banking’, to ‘digitalising parent letters’, ‘tackling meat consumerism’, ‘reimagining recruitment’ and ‘designing solutions for infection prevention’. This has made our work extremely interesting and rewarding.

• And we have survived a global pandemic and came out stronger. I can’t wait to see what the next year will bring!

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Five years ago, Linda, Stefano and I decided to spin-off a company out of our education efforts at Spark Labs at ETHZ. We received requests to tackle innovation challenges from a few companies and started working on them before we had even actually set up a legal entity. Be fast, honest, rigorous and obsessively human-centred were the principles we set off with without realising, they’d be the basis for our success.
 We have worked hard, but also been extremely lucky. Most of all, lucky to have had the chance to meet and work with amazing people across nationalities, industries and specialties. We have made lifelong friends, partners and even had a few babies. Along the way, being a Sparky, became something special that brings us together.
 Thank you to all those wonderful people with whom we have shared this 5-year journey. We look forward to many more!

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Back five years ago, I had read about start-ups in a million different articles. When Alan and Linda came up with the idea of spinning out a company from Spark Labs, I thought 'Why not? I should know something about it'. Mmm, well. Five years later, I have learnt to trust the process. We have a wonderful team of people that puff and pant and push and pull. And have fun. Together, we have discovered new ways of learning things, making sense of problems, solve a few, discover more interesting ones, and engage our clients in this journey with us. And then do it again. Happy birthday everyone!