“Switzerland” is the answer to this question: Who keeps churning out all the good innovations?
Maybe you’ve zipped your pants this morning. (I sure hope you did!) And maybe you started your day by dropping a Nespresso capsule into your coffee maker for an instant cup of Joe.
Have you felt the Swiss ingenuity? Because both of these use cases are examples of Swiss inventions that have changed the world.
I don’t blame you for thinking mountains, cheese and chocolate when you hear Switzerland. But by the time you reach the bottom of this article, I want you to think words like “innovation”, “green energy” and “robotics”. Granted, there is always space for chocolate, too.
Switzerland is an innovation nation.
Currently, there are 8.5 million Swiss passports on this planet. Now take into account the 8,838 patents filed by Switzerland in 2017 or the 43,031 scientific documents published by academics in Switzerland in 2016, and you will see a pattern emerge: The amount of scientific output in proportion to the Swiss population is tremendous. (It’s only fair to note that a large number of patents is filed by a small number of multinationals, however, such as pharmaceutical giants in Basel.)
In any case: Switzerland is a world champion when it comes to innovation, ranking ahead of nations like Germany or the United States.
But don’t listen to me. Listen to the experts who compile the Global Innovation Index that has routinely named Switzerland as the most innovative country. (They measure innovation indicators such as knowledge, technology and creativity.)
Enough statistics - let’s get practical!
Up in the air, Switzerland has brought you the Solar Impulse airplane which has successfully surrounded the globe using the power of the sun. It was developed at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, one of Switzerland’s pillars of innovation.
On the ground, two young Swiss engineers have launched Climeworks. Their premise is to suck harmful carbon dioxide from the air. Once turned into concentrated gas, the CO² is sold to producers of carbonated beverages such as Coca Cola. Or it can be used to heat a greenhouse, as is the case in Hinwil, Switzerland.
Below the ground, a team including students of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich has caught the attention of Elon Musk and SpaceX: the Swissloop transport capsule finished in third place at the Hyperloop pod competition in 2017.
Finally, let’s look at entertainment. Cutting edge technologies developed in Switzerland have left a mark in Hollywood blockbusters the world over. Do you remember the character of Maz Kanata in Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Her animated alien face came right out of the Disney Research Institute in Zurich, Switzerland.
Thanks to their proprietary Medusa technology, facial expressions as well as the slightest movements were captured off of Lupita Nyong’o, the real-life actress, then superimposed onto the CG character.
In downtown Zurich, just across the train tracks from Disney, is Google’s largest engineering hub outside of Silicon Valley. There, more than 2,000 employees are busy coding on Google Maps, researching machine learning or playing with artificial intelligence— all the while sitting inside cable cars or hanging out in the wine cellar.
Software applications that many of us take for granted were developed by Zurich’s engineers, such as Google Translate or the image recognition algorithms built into Google Photos.
How are the Swiss pulling off all this innovation?
Compared to the country’s GDP, the Swiss invest a large junk into research and development. And this three percent invest is basically the secret Swiss sauce to enabling innovation. Be it a solid education system, reliable infrastructure or a stable political climate, government institutions at all levels are gung-ho when it comes to creating an environment conducive to R&D.
One could make a point that much of Switzerland’s innovation can be traced back to the country’s widely recognized science universities, namely EPFL in Lausanne, ETH in Zurich and SUPSI in Lugano. It’s where all the basic research is taking place. And the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is an example of how Switzerland collaborates internationally.
Commercial spin-offs are in charge of handling all the applied research and development, as well as product development and marketing. In their symbiotic relationship with academia, they will feed practical use cases from real life back to their university partners for validation.
It’s thanks to this close collaboration among academic and commercial players that ideas do come to fruition in Switzerland.
Over the decades, Swiss universities have produced more spin-offs than you can count. They now develop everything from safe drones to exoskeleton solutions or autonomous robots.
Speaking of robots: Wouldn’t you say that Switzerland has come a long way since inventing the yodeling Radio Man robot of 1939?
