The imprint of innovation to attract companies and tourism

The data is well known and it is not even new: since 2010 Switzerland has consistently held first place in the "Global Innovation Index" created by the World Intellectual Property Organization.

This was also the case in the 2021 report and, pending the 2022 update, the project to integrate the East Innovation Park in the network of Switzerland Innovation Park, as the sixth responsible body, as proof of a dynamism aimed at strengthening the Switzerland as an attractive place for the settlements of foreign companies operating in various technological sectors, from robotics to med tech, fromartificial intelligence to advanced manufacturing via the blockchain.

The recent first edition of the "Swiss Tech Experience Week" fits into this strategy, a week of meetings and visits, organized by Switzerland Global Enterprise e Switzerland Tourism, to raise awareness of the Swiss ecosystem of innovation, a week in which executives and entrepreneurs of five technology companies from the United States, Canada, India, France and Italy, selected by a jury (made up of Dominic Gorecky, director of the Swiss Smart Factory , Anthony Palmieri, chief business innovation officer of HPE Switzerland, and Katiuska Molina-Luna, technology transfer officer of NCCR Robotics), had the opportunity to get in touch with a cutting-edge reality that aims to further qualify as a strategic and stable headquarters for companies that are making their way in the various tech sectors that in Switzerland.

Giovanni Zappatore: "It is Med Tech that gives concrete help"
Video, the activities of the first "Swiss Tech Experience Week"

Med Tech, robotics, artificial intelligence: five SMEs invited

The network of Innovation Parks, the Federal Polytechnics and universities, fertile ground for entrepreneurial acceleration.

It was a tailor-made experience for the five winning companies of the contest, including the Italian BionIT Labs, a Salento start-up that designed and created Adam's hand, the first fully adaptive bionic hand, which took starts a week through the founder and CEO, Giovanni Antonio Zappatore.

The group of selected companies included companies from different sectors, but all with a high innovative capacity: the American Shimmer Industries, which operates in the lighting design sector with 3D modeling and real-time simulation, the Canadian Trendi, which operates in the of robotics and artificial intelligence, to offer solutions to the problem of food waste, the Indian UnboxRobotics, which works on parcel sorting for the logistics industry and the other European, the French Chronolife, whose wearable medical devices, through a neuromorphic algorithm, allow continuous "edge computing" monitoring also based on artificial intelligence and provide a dataset that can be used for various prediction and prevention purposes.

In Lausanne, the EPFL Innovation Park gives an encore

3 percent of Switzerland's GDP is now invested in research and development

Innovando.News, together with Vancouver Tech Journal, The Times of India and Swissnex India, had the opportunity to follow the "Swiss Tech Experience Tour", which is to innovation a bit like the Grand Tour of Switzerland is to tourism and , moreover, has exactly the same imaginative power.

The difference obviously lies in what you visit, but in both cases – tourism and innovation – it is clear that the presence of well-defined ecosystems has a strong attraction.

“Yes” to the establishment of a Swiss innovation fund

We look back on a fantastic Swiss Tech Experience Week! Thank you to all participants & partners for the interesting insights & engaging contributions!

Want to learn more about the best of #SwissTech too? 👉https://t.co/Bk0zbUioyk#SwissTech #WhySwitzerland #GrandTrainTour pic.twitter.com/S1eihbLdgn

— Invest Switzerland (@investCH) July 7, 2022

In this sense, the decision to propose a tailor-made visit scheme (in this case the ecosystem of the Innovation Parks between Basel and Bienne, the ETH Robotics Innovation Day in Zurich, the EPFL laboratories in Lausanne, the Novartis Campus and the introduction to hubs such as Novartis Biome and the med tech accelerator DayOne) has placed the accent on sectoral clusters whose magnetism is not only in the immanent technological presence – to be expected, after all certain environments have been conceived to host a significant amount of machinery, equipment and innovative interfaces – but in the informal atmosphere, in the generation of workplaces and research and in the regeneration of urban spaces that show everything except serious solemnity and represent one of the keys to fostering the intertwining of connections which, perhaps, they can also be born by challenging a robot at table football, and beating it, only to then realize that it has been set to the "easy" level.

When you come across data and reports that remember how Switzerland invests more than 3% of its Gross Domestic Product in research and development, is a hotbed of patents (almost 8 were filed in 2019, seventh place in the world), has attracted more than 850 multinationals who have established headquarters there, be they global or regional, and can count on an incentive tax system, perhaps we tend to underestimate that this is the case because, behind it, there is exactly that type of ecosystem.

Innovation and sustainability run between Zurich and Milan

A projected (and evocative…) image from the “Swiss Made Label”

Favorable environment, proximity of talents and technologies in fact end up attracting funding, co-financing or direct mandates from private individuals in the continuous search for new patents that are the consequence.

The presence and collaboration, within universities as well as innovation and research institutes, of the major international players, combined with the availability of latest generation technologies and equipment (augmented reality, virtual reality, digital twins, just to name a couple of examples) and the subdivision by thematic specificity of the various innovation hubs of the Confederation, are fundamental aspects of a system in which a company undergoes the image projected by the "Swiss Made Label". A guarantee, when possible.

All this is nothing new for students, researchers and technological innovation professionals who already live in Switzerland, but it may instead prove to be a surprise for all those who travel for work with a bleisure travel approach, i.e. one that integrates work , inevitably flexible, leisure and is gradually becoming an increasingly significant segment in the tourism market.

The future emerges in the international report "Switzerland 2035".

“Swisstainable”: the Swiss approach to the environment makes the difference

For security and stability, but also and above all for the international environment and diversity (Switzerland is permanently on the podium in the KOF Globalization Index), innovation tourism is now a reality for digital nomads, who can also count on the Swiss approach to the environment – ​​for which a specific and evocative term has been coined: “swisstainable” – which is reflected with a certain coherence in a particular direction of technological innovation which makes no secret of focusing on a evolution attentive to sustainability and the circular economy.

In a tourism sector, the Swiss one, in whose forecasts only in 2024 will we return to pre-C levelsOVID (but which today is at the levels of 2016, before the boom blocked by the pandemic), anything related to the business of innovation can prove to be a very valuable pretext.

The new Google Campus Europaallee has opened in Zurich