Swiss innovation drives Industry 4.0 forward

Innovative and competitive - this is exactly what the Swiss ICT industry should represent in the country and sell its strengths better; this is the conclusion of ICTswitzerland Managing Director Andreas Kaelin.

Switzerland was represented with three joint stands: at the two established SWISS Pavilions "Research & Technology" and "Industrial Supply" organized by SCHOCH Marketing, and at the SWISS Pavilion in the "Digital Factory" area, which has been organized since 2018 by T-LINK in cooperation with the umbrella organization ICTswitzerland. The latter ran under the slogan "SWITZER- LAND - Excellence in Digital Transformation".

Various Swiss start-ups
Under the motto "Integrated Industry - In- dustrial Intelligence", around 80 Swiss exhibitors demonstrated how the physical and virtual worlds are merging in industrial value-added processes at the Hannover Messe from 1 to 5 April 2019.
The focus was on the presentation of Switzerland's education, research and innovation landscape. With the École polytech- nique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Ber- ner Fachhochschule (BFH) and the Interstate University of Applied Sciences Buchs (NTB), internationally recognised universities were on board thanks to the support of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

Numerous start-ups from various research institutions used the platform for their first steps on the international market. Of the total of 120 start-ups at EPFL, 11 were present this year. "The SWISS Pavilion offers us the perfect platform to demonstrate Swiss innovative strength and to initiate research projects with companies worldwide. It is also an opportunity for our start-ups to showcase themselves internationally," explains Antoine Jourdan, Director of Switzerland Innovation Park Network West EPFL.

Dominic Gorecky, Head of Swiss Smart Factory at the Switzerland Innovation Park Biel, adds: "We Swiss are often very reserved in international comparison, but we should not hide when it comes to innovation. We are particularly competitive in many areas of Industry 4.0 and we can show that."

Cafeteria I4.0 Learning Factory
Daniel Gillmann, founder of the Cafeteria I4.0, illustrated how renowned companies and research can benefit from each other and make technology accessible for classic processes: "The Cafeteria I4.0 is a learning factory that brings Industry 4.0 applications to life. Cooperation is the key to success. By implementing the various technologies of our sponsoring companies Solve Engineering, Trumpf and Omron, we can also transport Swiss innovations visibly and understandably here in Hanno- ver."

Technology from Bossard, one of the largest exhibitors at the SWISS Pavilion, can also be found in the I4.0 cafeteria.

Germany is Switzerland's most important trading partner and the Hannover Messe is the gateway to the most important international markets. Andreas Kaelin emphasizes: "Switzerland as a knowledge nation must regain strength in the export of ICT services! While the ICT services balance was still balanced a few years ago, it has now slipped to a minus of three billion francs."