Mercury - Jupiter [Bridge the gap between scientists & business people]

To bridge the gap between scientists and business people in Bulgaria and help them understand each other’s culture, CSI (Richard Smits) in cooperation with betahaus Sofia, KISMC and Sofia Tech Park organise Mercury - Jupiter Meetings. During those meetings business people and scientists explain to each other their culture and way of work and discuss ways to bridge the gap between them.

In the Global Innovation Index, Bulgaria is 41st out of the 142 countries studied: it is one of the lowest in the EU, but better than all of Bulgaria’s neighbours and better than the world average. However, in one aspect, “University/industry research collaboration”, Bulgaria is far worse than the countries it normally compares itself with. It only scores 114th, 12 places below Burkina Faso! This means that a lot can be gained if we can improve on this aspect.

In 1992, the American author John Gray published the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”, where he explained the differences between men and women as cultural differences and concluded that they “seem to be from different planets”. The same may be said of scientists and business people.​​