For me, Open Geneva has opened an exciting window and touched my deep concept, allowing me to see the possibility of an innovative and transformative approach of innovation and entrepreneurship education. Recall that in 2017, I was the director of Tsinghua x-lab, the innovation and entrepreneurship education platform of Tsinghua University. My team's responsibility was to provide learning courses, mentoring support and resource help for the innovation and entrepreneurship activities carried out by students, alumni and teachers. In those days, we were plagued by some fundamental issues, such as inadequate introduction to the values and concepts of sustainable development, and students' lack of understanding of the challenges and problems facing humankind; At the same time, knowledge learning is still dominant in the higher education system, students lack practical and experiential learning; Students' creativity is often limited to the problems around the campus, and they are often unable to identify the real social/market problems. In March 2017, I was invited by Professor Francois Grey to attend a seminar of innovation education in the University of Geneva. Accompanied by Dr. Thomas Maillart and Francois, I had the opportunity to visit several hackathons of the first Open Geneva Festival and served as the judge of the final. After returning to Beijing, the impression of the trip to Geneva was always lingering in my mind. For the first time in my career, I realized that innovation hackathon could be the best choice to tackle those issues in the university.

The model of Open Geneva is not self-satisfaction, but is unique with large-scale, practical learning, and openness. It is very necessary to introduce this model into Tsinghua University and many other universities. In the summer of 2019, Thomas with his students visited Tsinghua x-lab. We jointly carried out SDG Innovation Boot Camp for students from Tsinghua, and other Chinese and international universities. During the break session, I inquired of Thomas whether it’s possible to help me launch Open Geneva similar activity on Tsinghua campus. Thomas offered very positive answer. With the purpose to adapt to Tsinghua’ environment, and to train students to think systematically about the major challenges (poverty alleviation, access to public services, environmental sustainability) from a number of disciplinary perspectives, and with a solutions orientation, I decided to name the hackathon event as SDG Open Hack! Tsinghua. In November, 2019, the first SDG Open Hack was carried out on Tsinghua campus, for the first time in the University’ history, in which more than 500 participated. As of to-date, four consecutive SDG Open Hack of Tsinghua University are broadly well received with excellent evaluation and feedback from participating students.

Open Geneva and SDG Open Hack are now sister activities that combine innovation and entrepreneurship with education for the SDGs. We can continue to work together to further develop the learning system and conduct joint education development and research projects. For example, sorting out some Open Geneva project cases will be very enlightening to Chinese students. I look forward to carrying out more collaborations with Open Geneva.