Brešová will be in charge of developing the university's cooperation with industrial companies, will lead the Industry Relations area and will also chair the advisory board focused on cooperation with business. This is one of the areas on which the new CTU leadership is building its ambition to move the university among the world's top universities.
"The (future) success of CTU depends, among other things, on close cooperation between the research conducted at the university and the companies that can use it. This is already working here in many places. My task is to turn these individual bridges into a network, unify it and bring it to world-class standards - in simple terms, to build highways where there are only trails today - and to help companies gain priority access to cutting-edge research and technologies so that world-class research does not remain in drawers and great companies do not lose their innovative potential," Brešová explains on LinkedIn.
The expert has been active in the startup environment for over 14 years. She was one of the managers who helped scale Kiwi.com from a small company to a company with almost two thousand employees. She later worked as the COO of the augmented reality startup Pocket Virtuality, which was subsequently acquired by the Czechoslovak Group (CSG) arms manufacturer. She was part of the top management of the American Groupon after its takeover by the investment group Pale Fire Capital. And in recent years she has worked as a partner in the Presto Tech Horizons fund, a joint venture of investors from Presto Ventures and CSG investing in defense and security technologies. However, several partners left Presto in connection with the events surrounding the founder Přemysl Rubeš, which resulted in his detention by the police in March. Brešová left at the beginning of the year.
At CTU, Rector Michal Pěchouček is managing to concentrate interesting reinforcements from business. Among other things, the institution has, for the first time in its history, a director of information security, who was replaced by an external researcher for NATO. In addition to him, the team also includes Jakub Nešetřil, who sold the startup Apiary to Oracle, and crypto specialist Ladislav Krištoufek.