Masterpieces of Swiss Entrepreneurship

Switzerland’s concentration of successful small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is both remarkable and inspiring. From Caran d’Ache, the luxury writing instruments leader, to Ricola, many have achieved enviable niche positions in the global export marketplace. 

A new book by IMD Professor Emeritus Jean-Pierre Jeannet and co-authors Cornelia Amstutz, Thierry Volery and Heiko Bergmann, Masterpieces of Swiss Entrepreneurship, spotlights these successful SMEs. The authors explain in great detail how and why SMEs are a critical element of the Swiss economy while emphasizing how exactly these companies arrived at their positions.  

However, this text is not a cookbook offering simple recipes for success. The authors instead feature management practices relevant to practitioners, in addition to offering input for academics, policymakers, educators and the general public. The title Masterpieces of Swiss Entrepreneurship was chosen, in part, because the achievements of these companies may also inspire future generations of entrepreneurs. The hope is to impact the managerial practice of existing firms, as well as of companies that are yet to be created.  

Published by Springer, this open-access book is based on more than a decade of in-depth documentation and analysis of 36 Swiss companies over their entire history. Jeannet and his team present several parallels in the pathways and success factors which allowed these firms to assert their dominance and operate from a high-cost location like Switzerland.  

The book enhances these insights by providing detailed company profiles documenting company history, development and how their global positions were reached. Readers will benefit from these profiles as they comprise a diverse selection of industries – mainly active within the B2B sector – with mostly mature companies (60 years to over 100 years since their founding) and different types of ownership structures including family firms.   

Masterpieces of Swiss Entrepreneurship is exceptional in that it includes a comprehensive, bottom-up approach with an extensive field research process coupled with in-depth analysis. The case research offers insights along the longitudinal development of firms and the reasons why and how certain decisions were taken. It also focuses on the environmental context of a firm, and how SMEs interact with the local ecosystem – ranging from economic development to public infrastructure to educational institutions. 

Since the founders of these companies and their successors play an intrinsic role in the book, they are described in detail before their actions and practices are meticulously covered in the later chapters. Thanks to the personal interviews with many owners and managers of the companies featured, the authors add deep insights to their data and a sophisticated analysis of entrepreneurial dynamics. 

The book reveals the “secret” of Swiss PME’s success. For these companies, longevity is driven largely by adhering to particular management styles and practices, such as focus, segmentation, marketing, innovation and supply chain. Growth, however, is largely driven by company governance and finance models, as well as balancing independence vs. autonomy over time, regardless of access to external capital.  

Firms that learned how to progress along both vectors achieved superior results over the long term, earning them the fitting title of “Masterpiece of Swiss Entrepreneurship”.