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The ePower parliamentary group discussed the highly topical and virulent subject of cyber security at its traditional session event on Tuesday evening. National Councillor Franz Grüter, member of the ePower core team, welcomed top-class representatives from politics, administration, business and science. The cross-party audience agreed: cyber security is the order of the day.
The evening was opened by none other than Federal Councillor Ueli Maurer. The head of the Federal Department of Finance left no doubt about the importance of the topic: the cyber threat is one of the four main risks for Switzerland.
The complete article is available in the national language German and French.
Bern, 26 January 2022 – Many Swiss companies are desperately seeking skilled workers. A targeted amendment to the Foreign Nationals and Integration Act (FNIA) is intended to make it easier for foreign graduates of Swiss universities to be employed in Switzerland in areas where there is a shortage of skilled workers. This was made possible by a motion from FDP National Councillor and digitalswitzerland Vice President Marcel Dobler.
Read the press release in German | in French
To the complete statement on the FNIA by digitalswitzerland (available in German)
Media contact:
Andreas W. Kaelin, digitalswitzerland, Bern Office
Phone +41 31 311 62 45 │ andreas@digitalswitzerland.com
In partnership with Bilanz, Handelszeitung and PME, digitialswitzerland is once again celebrating the 100 people changing the face of the Swiss digital landscape.
The 100 Digital Shapers have shown bravery and commitment to digitalisation in extremely challenging times. As we transition into this post-Covid period, we asked our Shapers about their views of the digital future, how Switzerland can stand out and what advice they would give to their 16-year-old selves.
Corina Schedler is the co-founder of Code Excursion – a female coding school. A self-taught web developer, Corina has developed a community that teaches women the basics of programming. She is passionate to support women who wish to make a career shift into the tech industry.
Q: If you could give your 16-year-old self one piece of advice (career or life), what would it be?
A: “Success is what you define it to be. So define it as the sense of wonder or joy you feel while doing something. Don’t study for good grades but for what interests you. In the longterm people pleasing will lead nowhere. Get to know yourself, notice the moments of passion and trust your intuition. Be intentional about your decisions because your choices have a bigger impact than you think.”
Raphaël Brunschwig is the Chief Operating Officer at the Locarno Film Festival. He focuses on how digitalisation plays a transformative role in the strategic development of the festival, a process which has been sped up due to Covid-19. An exciting future lies ahead for events that no longer follow a traditional framework.
Q: Where do you think Switzerland can make the most impact on the digital innovation stage?
A: “Switzerland’s great strength lies in its neutrality, its expertise, and its tradition as an abiding place for reflection and exchange. We are therefore faced with an opportunity to present ourselves as a place that poses the question of ethics with respect to the digital revolution. And this puts us in a unique position. As Kissinger put it, if the Enlightenment was an ideal in search of the tools by which we might realize our potential, the digital revolution is an incredible toolkit desperately in search of a guiding philosophy. We therefore have the strength and credibility to be a land that reflects and engenders reflection on the great changes taking place in the world and the digital realm.“
Melanie Gabriel is Chief Marketing Officer and Co-founder of Yokoy, the all-in-one spend management platform. Melanie is passionate about streamlining and simplifying payment processes using AI. Last year, Yokoy secured 1.7 million Swiss francs in seed funding which has allowed for scaling and exciting market expansion.
Q: What are you most excited about for digital innovation for 2021 and beyond?
A: “There have been many breakthroughs in artificial intelligence recently. A firework of innovation can be observed. Increased computing power and the availability of large amounts of data are opening up gigantic new possibilities for machine learning. This will revolutionize many areas. Think about medicine or the financial sector. Especially in fintech things will change rapidly.”
Theodora Dragan is Data Protection Officer and Legal Counsel at the CyberPeace Institute. As Chairperson of the Swiss section of the International Association of Privacy Professionals and co-founder of the Swiss DPO Association, Theodora’s mission is to strengthen data protection systems against cyber attacks, and to support organisations in striking the right balance between their own interests and individual rights and freedoms.
Q: If you could give your 16-year-old self one piece of advice (career or life), what would it be?
A: “Show kindness and compassion to yourself and others, and do not allow yourself to be defined by your success or by your defeat. Accomplishments are just as fleeting as failures – so try not to take either too seriously. In the famous words of celebrated Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Luc Haldimann is Founder and CEO of Unblu, a Conversational Platform for Financial Services. It empowers financial institutions to increase online conversions and deliver better customer experience. As a board member of the SwissICT association, Luc promotes the exchange between software providers, users and specialists, and as a consultant he supports software companies in offering their digital solutions.
Q: Where do you think Switzerland can make the most impact on the digital innovation stage?
A: “Besides biotech and pharma, Switzerland provides a great environment for innovation at the intersection of financial services, privacy, and security. The accelerating need for digital transformation provides a massive chance for us to build software based services for the future of trust between people and machines. We have lived through two decades of online and mobile automation. It’s time to add the human factor back in.“
Naomi MacKenzie is Co-founder Kitro, a state-of-the-art imaging solution that provides instant analysis of your food waste. Initially focused on the catering industry, Kitro has now further expanded its customer segment to work with medical centers. As a trainer and speaker at Venturelab, Naomi also trains and supports start-ups on their way to future success.
Q: If you could give your 16-year-old self one piece of advice (career or life), what would it be?
A: “Learn how to code ;). Don’t stress about things you can’t change.”
Harry Halpin is CEO of Nym Technologies, which has the mission to establish privacy as a default for online communications. When Harry worked at World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) / Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with every major Silicon Valley company on web standards, he saw how badly companies managed to protect the privacy of customers. In his opinion, there is only one way to maintain the right to privacy: with cryptography. It is his aim to make the advantages of encryption available to everyone.
Q: Where do you think Switzerland can make the most impact on the digital innovation stage?
A: “Switzerland is a country remarkable due to its decentralization of government and its focus on privacy. It’s self-evident that cryptocurrency is the future of financial technology, and that less and less people trust Silicon Valley due to surveillance. As the world enters crisis, let’s not forget chaos is a ladder. As an American entrepreneur who left MIT to found a startup in Switzerland, this could be a benefit for Switzerland, as long as it increases it is favorable regulations for fields such as cybersecurity and cryptocurrency.”
Denis Morel is Head of the eGovernment Business Unit at Swiss Post. An exciting time for Denis’s team, Swiss Post’s e-voting project should be ready to launch in early 2022. Denis places key importance on trust and transparency for the project to be a success. He believes that eVoting will improve opportunities for participation in the voting process.
Q: What will be the biggest change in the world of digital and the way you work in the next 10 years?
A: “Digital innovation requires the ability to accept mistakes and to learn from them. It is particularly important for the government and state institutions, which are building high, secure critical applications. In Switzerland, the “Mistake Culture” (or better the “Improvement Culture”) is mainly missing. All actors in Switzerland (Politics, Media, Government, Enterprises and People) have to change to this culture. This will be, from my point of view, a big change in the next ten years for a successful digital transformation in Switzerland.”
Agnès Petit Markowski is founder and CEO of Mobbot. Agnès’s mission is to help reduce the impact of the massive use of concrete in infrastructure. Mobbot has created innovative technology for the robotization and automation of sprayed concrete. As a result, a concrete element weighing one tonne can be printed in less than ten minutes.
Q: What are you most excited about for digital innovation for 2021 and beyond?
A: “Crisis helps the adoption of a change. The pandemic has favoured the digitalisation of many sectors. Now, the most exciting time will be the post-Covid era. What surprises me however, is that we still have “Chief Digital Officers” or ”Digital Director” roles or departments within companies. Digitalization should be part of our DNA. It is neither a department nor a job title.I think the post-Covid era will help to accelerate this change for many companies.”
Florian Falleggger is Co-Founder at Neurosoft Bioelectronics. Florian and his team are developing the next generation of soft implantable electrodes to interface seamlessly with the nervous system. Advances in this field offer the potential for medical devices that can restore the impaired functions of the nervous system through electrical stimulation or recording of neural tissue.
Q: What are you most excited about for digital innovation in 2021 and beyond?
A: “I believe medicine will see a revolution in the standard of care by integrating new digital solutions in the treatment pipeline. By accumulating and combining different data streams directly from patients, new personalized and more precise therapies can be achieved. Additionally, data that is collected from large groups of patients can be used to discover new bio-markers for novel treatments.”
Read the full interviews with all 100 Digital Shapers in this dedicated Bilanz publication.
The digitalisation industry suffered from the crises of 2001 and 2008. In 2020, it is flourishing. Office work becomes remote work. Paper-based processes become online workflows. Factories and supply chains continue to run thanks to automation. We are about to take a 10-year leap into the future. This will shower us with productivity gains. We can even offset our covid costs this way.
In the spring of 2020, a letter from the venture fund Sequoia on the Covid crisis circulated in the tech industry. Memories of the 2001 and 2008 crises resonated. Sequoia suggested: Batten down the hatches. Prepare for the storm. Downsize.
I understand Sequoia’s letter. I lived and worked in Silicon Valley from 1998 to 2007 and through both crises. The dot-com crisis wiped out almost all start-ups in Silicon Valley. Streets and restaurants were empty, similar to the Covid crisis. Then there was the shock of 9/11. I left my employer McKinsey & Co and turned around a company. I lowered the cost base, built a new product and attracted investment.
From this experience, I founded Zattoo in 2005. I picked up the pace. There was a lot of interest in our offering. We expanded. We hired. We were a small sensation.
The financial crisis of 2008 came abruptly. All startups, not just Zattoo, were hit without warning because they didn’t have time to scan the environment for macro threats. Startups are fully occupied with user growth, product design, revenue growth and building the organisation.
Since there was no more venture capital available in the market, I even sold my flat in San Francisco in January 2009 to pay Zattoo’s content bill. The money was sitting between the US and Switzerland for about two months because the banks didn’t trust each other any more. I was able to pledge shares to raise cash for the company. I was able to convince Tamedia (now TX Ventures) to come in. With inventiveness and cost discipline, we were finally able to gain a foothold in 2010. Zattoo has since grown organically as an SME by about 20-30% a year.
After overcoming this crisis, I built up Zattoo’s Board of Directors. As president until 2019, I dedicated myself to, among other things, keeping the company crisis-resistant and recognising danger signals in advance. I hoarded cash to be able to help the company in case of an emergency. The TX Group took over the majority in April 2019. I relinquished the presidency. We continue to develop the company together.
When I first heard about Covid in January 2020, I was initially spooked. Memories of 2001 and 2008 flared up. I asked myself: How can Zattoo cope with the impending pandemic? The pandemic could lead the advertising industry to curb, delay, rebook or stop its spending. The cloud systems of Zattoo and the telecom industry were not designed to run autonomously for long periods of time. Even worse developments were conceivable.
I consulted my acquaintances, including an executive from McKinsey & Company China in February 2020. In conversation, we came up with a predicted decline in GDP to -3%, and Swiss GDP actually fell to about -3%.
It looked even more threatening in the short term, but it recovered during 2020. It recovered because we were able to keep working thanks to digitalisation. There was no need for an emergency programme at Zattoo or many tech companies. On the contrary, the tech industry was booming.
In the short term, innovations are overrated. The dot-com crisis of 2001 was a crisis of disillusionment, so to speak. In the long term, however, innovations are underestimated. In 2020, thanks to digitalisation, we have just lived through the first crisis in which we were soft-bedded by robots: a moment for the history books.
The economy, education, health, defence, finance, transport and energy were more crisis-resistant in 2020 thanks to digitalisation. Digitalisation is finally in full bloom:
The cloud allows collaborative work on letters, presentations, spreadsheets and more. It relieves us of server administration and provides better load distribution and higher availability than if we administered the servers ourselves.
The cloud is growing rapidly. Office work is increasingly done on Google Docs or with Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud. Privately, over a billion people now use the Apple Cloud. For all loads that are elastic or fluctuating, and for all workpieces that are handled by several actors at the same time, the cloud makes sense.
Zattoo itself offers examples of cloud services: Instead of storing recordings locally, our viewers access our cloud. Ideally, only one master copy is needed of many recordings that would all be the same. This saves money. Our B2B customer base (telecommunications and cable companies) also uses cloud services: instead of feeding TV signals from satellites via so-called headends themselves, they use our cloud service. Out of many thousands of headends in Europe, which all do roughly the same thing, it will ultimately take a handful in the cloud. Since each headend involves an investment of about CHF 10 million and ongoing costs, this saves a lot of money.
Online retail and delivery services are growing strongly and sustainably. Once users have broken old habits, opened a user account and ordered online, it is easy for them to order the pre-configured shopping basket again. Once they have practised the new behaviour, they stick with it.
GDP fell by CHF 25 billion in 2020; it will rise in 2021. A capital injection of CHF 70 billion flowed from the federal treasury. Let’s take this sum as a yardstick and ignore how this money from the economy ends up back in the state, because it will sooner or later. Let’s see if we can make it up in 10 years: That would be CHF 7 billion per year, or 1% of the gross national product in Switzerland of about CHF 700 billion.
This is possible: Assuming 700,000 remote workers, this amounts to CHF 10,000 per capita per year. We can achieve savings in these areas:
For Switzerland, remote working can be the salvation from our graphical constraints. Employees can be geographically distributed throughout Switzerland or abroad. We no longer need to limit recruitment to a 100km radius around the workplace. Remote working opens up a larger pool of candidates for recruitment and promotes diversity and specialization. With remote working, it becomes cheaper to establish a startup in Switzerland.
Remote work increases employee satisfaction. Deloitte-Switzerland studies from 2020 and 2021 show: A majority of employees want to work in a hybrid way and by no means want to give up the benefits of remote working. Employees have lost a considerable amount of time commuting – they no longer want to bear this burden. They enjoy the freedom of working in places with low costs and high quality of life – this opens up new perspectives. They save time through fewer obligatory business trips. Remote work makes it easier for women to re-enter the world of work by allowing them to divide their time between the office and home.
Remote work preferences are not the same across age groups, and they also differ between industries and countries. In Japan, the loss of the “presence culture” is a major challenge. An anecdote from Japan was brought to my attention. A boss had never organised a video conference from home and asked if it would be possible for his assistants to help with this task. This type of work was always done in the office by specialists. For traditional bosses, remote work is a challenge.
There have been other times: in 2013, the then boss of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, was still trying to get employees away from remote working. “Innovation happens in the pressure cooker of Yahoo’s development centre in Silicon Valley,” is how I would summarize her words. She saw innovation as a contact sport. Innovation is now possible online because the tools of work have improved.
The IT industry is now seizing the opportunity to offer employees attractive working conditions with remote working. It is by far the best prepared for this. Other sectors have also discovered that remote working works. Security is better than feared. So far, no new data has emerged from private banking.
Corona has done more to accelerate the digitalisation of Switzerland than all the digital initiatives we have had so far. From maybe 10’000 remote workers in Switzerland before the Covid crisis, we have made a leap to over 1 million (out of a total workforce of almost 5 million). When we talk about 700’000 remote jobs over the next 10 years, we understand the scale of change.
The digitalswitzerland initiative, the CH++ science initiative, Open Data Switzerland, the industry association asut and others can help us carry the momentum from covid digitisation. They can contribute to the flourishing of Switzerland with inspiration and know-how transfer.
We know this: a clever strategy is announced, and we fudge about it because we like it differently. Does our force of habit now nullify the benefits of COVID digitization? Shall we return to box 1?
Let’s start with ourselves. We’ve learned how to organise ourselves in a home office. A zoom room would be ideal. We’ve learned to cook food, plant seeds, bake bread. Ideally, we would have our own garden. We travel more individually, less in groups. A camper would be perfect.
We improvise in the way we teach. An age-appropriate mix of face-to-face and online teaching would be ideal:
We may say to ourselves, “my stock portfolio has gone up, my real estate is worth more now, I don’t need to put up with the new world of work.” Or we’ve been ruined and can’t do it anymore. The Covid crisis is causing older workers in particular to leave the workforce.
For us to reap the benefits of digitalisation, we need to break the habit of returning to old-fashioned offices where we wear headphones to work intently. Instead, let’s reinvent offices and embrace the remote working opportunity that served us well during the Covid crisis.
About Bea Knecht
Bea Knecht digitalises media services with her start-ups Zattoo, Genistat and Levuro. Genistat employs experts in media data science. Levuro employs experts in social media engagement. Wingman is a VC fund she supports: By Entrepreneurs, For Entrepreneurs. Bea Knecht serves on the boards of the Society for Marketing and CH++ and is a member of the Federal Media Commission. She is a recipient of the IAB Lifetime Award, the Best of Swiss Web Award and the Emmy Award.
For the fifth year in a row, this major event on the topic of digitalisation will bring together the Swiss population to address the opportunities and challenges of digital change.
On 10 November, it will be that time again and the Swiss Digital Day, initiated by digitalswitzerland will take place nationwide. During the 6 weeks before Digital Day, from 29 September to 9 November, even more participants than ever can choose from hundreds of activities to develop ideas together, discuss issues of an increasingly digital future and acquire digital skills.
Press release available in German, French and Italian.
At 61.1 years, the average age of older employees in information and communications technology (ICT) is comparatively low. This is the conclusion of a recent study by digitalswitzerland on mobilising the potential of skilled workforce.
Even before the regular retirement age is reached, valuable workforce potential is lost – this must be prevented in view of the high shortage of skilled workers in ICT. The study shows measures that companies and policymakers can take to keep skilled professionals in the workforce longer.
Federal Councillor Karin Keller-Sutter will deliver the opening address. Maria Victoria Haas and Tanya König will moderate through the evening held on 11 November at the Hallenstadion Zurich.
Find out more about awards categories and awards information here.
Photo credit: Eduard Maltzer
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