Empowering Innovation
What We Do
IMD’s mission is to challenge what is and inspire what could be, and to develop leaders who transform organizations and contribute to society. This requires an entrepreneurial mindset: a willingness to try something new. Since 1998, IMD EMBAs and MBAs have collaborated with over 500 Swiss startups and helped strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We work with startups, scaleups and other high-growth, high-impact initiatives to help them direct leadership, create a strategy, build in customer-centricity, and construct a resilient organization that delivers to its customers, employees, and shareholders. When an IMD graduate creates or joins a startup that succeeds in its mission, we believe we have delivered on ours.
Empowering Innovation
Empowerment denotes the agency to innovate and forms the bedrock of entrepreneurial creativity. Whether in a new company or an existing corporation, it is the vital ingredient to all innovation.
Innovation requires a person or a team to believe there is a better way to do things. It also demands they believe that they can create the solution.
Startup Competition
Previous winners of the IMD Startup Competition have flourished. In the recently announced Top 100 Swiss Startups, 40 were ventures that had worked with us, including five of the top 25 scale-ups.
InStep, a digital health venture that aims to transform consumers’ movement data into personalized health analytics, has been selected as the inaugural winner of the IMD Venture Award.
NEMIS Technologies provides a lab-free detection system for pathogens. Investment enabled NEMIS to scale up production and to pursue its global expansion strategy.
The Swedish helicopter sales and marketing company, Savback Helicopters, and the Swiss eVTOL company, Dufour Aerospace, signed a distribution agreement for Dufour’s eVTOL aircraft.
Swiss healthcare startup Loop Medical is reinventing blood collection with its painless and easy-to-use blood collection device.
KOMP-ACT develops electric actuators to reduce machinery energy consumption. Investment from strategic investor, Pariter Partners, will support the development and growth of the Swiss startup.
Read the IMD Startup Competition conditions here.
IMD has also partnered with Innovaud for a new scale-up program for fast-growing startups.
Ecosystem
According to McKinsey, ecosystems will play a key role in every aspect of the global economy by 2030, driving around $80 trillion in annual revenues.
The key principle of ecosystem thinking is that we cannot create the future alone – organizations need to collaborate with a variety of partners that complement and reinforce each other.
Ecosystems enable organizations to grow, to drive a regenerative transformation, to jointly face challenges, and to explore opportunities.
No longer the exclusive domain of a handful of digital giants, ecosystems now represent the immediate future for transforming incumbents, new ventures, and platforms.
Find out how to create and orchestrate ecosystems.
Coronavirus has exposed the vulnerabilities of companies whose competitive advantage is based on the ownership of unique physical assets — such as airlines and cruise lines but also manufacturing and traditional retail.
Mohan Subramaniam explores how to unleash the power of data and digital ecosystems.
The best small companies boast ultra-close relationships with their customers. Using ecosystems can allow larger groups to learn from their example.
Mark J Greeven and Wei Wei analyze how Alibaba and peers Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi, and LeEco have grown so rapidly and successfully.
In 2021, a leadership development program for social impact leaders was launched in partnership with the elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization. The elea Entrepreneurs’ Community represents a vital element of IMD and elea’s engagement with its partner organizations. The Community provides a forum where social impact entrepreneurs can exchange ideas, co-create, and build capabilities to achieve impact and entrepreneurial success.
The Schwab Foundation identifies and selects the world’s leading community of social innovators – entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs – and engages them in shaping global, regional, and industry agendas that improve the state of the world in close collaboration with other leaders in business and government.
The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) is dedicated to increasing impact investing around the world by building critical infrastructure, education, research, and other activities. Impact investments are investments made to generate positive and measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. Impact investments can be made in both emerging and developed markets and target a range of returns.
EVPA is a unique network at the intersection of finance and purpose, driven by knowledge and focused on impact. We aim to increase prosperity and social progress for all, fix inequalities and injustices, and preserve the planet.
EVPA gathers a diverse group of capital providers (funds, foundations, investors, banks, public funders) and innovators to catalyse, innovate, and scale impact.
Ashoka is an international citizen-sector organization whose mission is to build an ‘Everyone a Changemaker World’™. Its vision is a world that responds effectively to social challenges, and where everyone is empowered to be a driver of positive change.
Ashoka has a community of over 3,500 social entrepreneurs it supports by helping them get started, grow, and collaborate.
The global financial system is changing, and Switzerland plays a leading role in it. Launched in 2021, the Impact Finance Forum addresses this change and contributes to strengthening the position of the financial sector as well as laying the foundation for a sustainable future for our next generation.
Levo helps entrepreneurs combine financial with social and environmental sustainability and bring it into the heart of their business planning. The framework provides entrepreneurs the tools to help them assess, monitor, and continuously improve the operational sustainability and impact of their business – future-proofing them year after year.
Our History
Jim Pulcrano, Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management, created the entrepreneurship stream of IMD’s EMBA program in 1999. His insights in the Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship over 24 years led to the creation of the IMD Startup Competition.
Since 1999, IMD EMBAs and MBAs have collaborated with over 500 Swiss startups and experienced entrepreneurship first hand. In doing so they developed respect for those who took a different path and gained valuable insight into the extreme ambiguity that founders face every day. Some have even been inspired to embrace entrepreneurship themselves.
Previous winners of other IMD Startup Competitions have flourished. In the recently announced Top 100 Swiss Startups, 40 were ventures that had worked with us, including five of the top 25 scaleups.
Some of our top entrepreneurial ‘alumni’ include, AC Immune (now a public company), Artmyn (which was sold to Invaluable), Dacuda (acquired by Magic Leap), Doodle (acquired by Tamedia), Faceshift (acquired by Apple), GlycArt (acquired by Roche), Kooaba (acquired by Qualcomm), and Swiss unicorns MindMaze and Nexthink among many other successful firms.
Case Study Timeline
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2001
New-animal.com: Merging Three E-Marketplaces
An exploration of the target market, core proposition, ancillary services, competitive environment, and business model of three European Read the case -
2002
Papyrus Laser
Papyrus Laser markets specialized stationery and products that enable small quantities of high-quality printed communications with just a PC and printer.
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2003
Shockfish
Shockfish, a 1998 Swiss startup, produced and sold SpotMe, a wireless networking device that enables people to meet, conduct business and interact at conferences.
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2005
Genedata
Venture Valuation conducts a valuation of Genedata, a Swiss start-up, to help Novartis Venture Fund structure the next financing round.
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2006
Endoart SA
EndoArt SA, a small venture, develops and commercializes medical devices for the telemetric control of the flow of bodily fluids.
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2011
Netflix
This case describes how Reed Hastings started up a DVD rental service in 1997 that gained over 4 million subscribers by 2007.
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2013
Social Entrepreneurship on Fogo Island
The Shorefast Foundation aims to promote economic and cultural resilience using a social entrepreneurship model in isolated communities of Newfoundland, Canada.
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2014
Freitag: Desiging the agile company
FREITAG specializes in bags made of recycled truck tarpaulins. Two graphic designers, Markus and Daniel Freitag, founded the company in 1993.
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2016
Gamaya: Taking Farming into the 21st Century
Gamaya credibly demonstrated the contributions its drone-born miniaturized hyperspectral cameras could bring to local sugar cane farmers in Brazil.
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2018
AM-Pharma: Creating value
This case describes the inception of biotech firm AM-Pharma in 2001, then continues up to its deal with Pfizer in 2015.
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2019
Beekeeper: From pivoting startup to disrupting scaleup
Beekeeper faced considerable challenges to become a fast-expanding company with over 130 employees across the world, with a plethora of large clients.
Research, Insight & News
IMD professors and research fellows now produce around 40 cases per year related to new ventures. Faculty insights into entrepreneurship are also featured in a growing number of articles, webinars and podcasts focused on this domain.
Much of this has been made possible due to increased opportunities to interact with entrepreneurs, and the appointment of six research fellows who work alongside faculty to capture the learnings.
In our wider community, IMD’s Alumni Center for Entrepreneurship strives to foster an ecosystem aimed at facilitating mentoring and the funding of business projects as an engine for innovation and growth.
By Pulcrano, Jim
DePoly CEO tells us more about the startup’s technology, which converts post-consumer PET items into virgin-grade raw materials, creating circular economy for plastics.
By Jim Pulcrano
In a time of more turbulent markets, there’s something to be said for slow and steady growth – with or without large amounts of capital.
By Pulcrano, Jim
Valentina, founder of Lympathica Medtech, tells us more about the startup’s solution, LymphoDrain, a micropump designed to be implanted just under the skin.
By Jim Pulcrano
Being humble, identifying key metrics, and partnering with anchor customers are some of the traits that might help CEOs beat the odds and reach “scale up” status.
By Jim Pulcrano, Stuart Woodcock, Ulrich Wendt, and Adrian Hunn
Semira, a medical doctor specializing in preventive medicine and a researcher in epigenetics, tells us more about her work and experience running her own company, Genknowme.
By Jim Pulcrano
Jamie Robertson joined in 2017 as an investor and CEO of a new unit in the UK and opened a store in London. Jamie perseveres as he realizes that the customer experience will make a difference.
By Alexandre Catsicas
How a group of EMBA students helped an industry-disrupting startup win over Silicon Valley investors during a discovery expedition to Palo Alto.
By Howard Yu and Marc Chauvet
Startup Matternet entered in 2017 the market of drone-based delivery of medical samples in Switzerland, via an investment from Swiss Post.
By Jim Pulcrano, Stuart Woodcock, Ulrich Wendt, and Adrian Hunn
Baabuk is a Swiss-based startup brand that sells woollen footwear. The case assesses the benefits of pricing over deep market analysis and considers the benefits of ‘customer fit’.
By Carlos Cordon and Teresa Ferreiro Vilarino
After developing powerful software, young entrepreneurs Raffael Maio and Joël Winteregg founded NetGuardians in 2007.
By Benoit Leleux, Vikas Menon, Garrett DeCock, and Hoi Wah Ma
As Serena Shamash opened the doors to her newly renovated restaurant, the last thing she was expecting to see was two inches of water covering the floor of the bar.
By Benoît Leleux
IR Microsystems developed a unique technology to produce a detector array for infrared light that could be used in a number of industrial sectors, most notably for composition analysis of gases and liquids.
By Benoît Leleux, Dinos Constantinou, and Henri Bourgeois
A niche airline startup in a crowded market provides students with the opportunity to examine topics such as market entry, competitive strategy, product differentiation and positioning, branding, and entrepreneurship.
By Benoît Leleux, Victoria Kemanian, Atul Pahwa, and Katrin Siebenbürger Hacki
The Novartis Venture Fund is considering investing into a start up, Genedata, and must take into account the valuation analysis.
By Carlos Cordon, Petri Lehtivaara, and Jussi Heikkilä
SourcingParts is a startup company providing supplier relationship management solutions. This case describes the situation that SourcingParts faced in the summer of 2002 and the development of its business.
By Paul Strebel and Anne-Valérie Ohlsson
The case describes the initial phase, including focusing the business, venture capital funding, winning the first client orders, reorganization, and diversification.
By Vanina Farber
Impact investment is a rapidly evolving, diverse world that offers value beyond financial returns for investors and social enterprises of all shapes and sizes.
By Sibongile Manganyi-Rath
Sibongile Manganyi-Rath, EMBA 2018, recognized with Influential Leaders award for improving access to healthcare in low-income communities in South African townships.
By Vanina Farber and Shih-Han Huang
How can a social enterprise stay true to its purpose while making money for itself and its investors, both traditional and impact?
By Rosario Bazán
One Peruvian company has grown a leading agribusiness while nurturing the health of communities and fostering female employment at the same time.
By Jim Pulcrano, Laure Frank, Désirée Gilgen, Konrad Meyer, and Federico Paparella
The case tells the story of Sami Arpa, a young entrepreneur with a passion for cinema. Sami Arpa and his startup Largo leverage technology to improve the movie industry.
By Jim Pulcrano, Stuart Woodcock, Ulrich Wendt, and Adrian Hunn
Semira, a medical doctor specializing in preventive medicine and a researcher in epigenetics, tells us more about her work and experience running her own company, Genknowme.
Social Innovation
Social innovation creates solutions that benefit society by addressing immediate needs more effectively than current policy or business activity. Social innovation develops products, services, markets or models and processes and relies on collaboration to optimize its impact on global society. The IMD elea Center for Social Innovation views ecosystem development as integral to the development and acceleration of social innovation.
Below are some examples of successful collaborations that have helped accelerate the speed, scale, and effectiveness of social innovations.