Latest articles about Innovation


2018: Swiss Innovation – World Best

On the final day of our Advent Calendar, we congratulate Switzerland for being the world’s best in innovation. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) carries out an annual study of worldwide innovation and calculates an index called the Global Innovation Index (GII). Switzerland has come out on top for the last 8 years.

2003: Solar Impulse

Solar Impulse is a Swiss long-range experimental solar-powered aircraft project, and also the name of the project’s two operational aircraft. The privately financed project was led by Swiss engineer and businessman André Borschberg and Swiss psychiatrist and balloonist Bertrand Piccard. The Solar Impulse project’s goals were to make the first circumnavigation of the Earth by a piloted fixed-wing aircraft using only solar power and to bring attention to clean technologies.

2003: Scala

Scala, short for Scalable Language, is a hybrid functional programming language. It was created by Martin Odersky, professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Scala smoothly integrates the features of object-oriented and functional languages. Scala is compiled to run on the Java Virtual Machine. Many existing companies, who depend on Java for business-critical applications, are turning to Scala to boost their development productivity, applications scalability and overall reliability.

1863: ICRC

Since its creation in 1863, the ICRC’s sole objective has been to ensure protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and strife. Its story is about the development of humanitarian action, the Geneva Conventions and the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

1986: High Temperature Superconductors

High-temperature superconductors (high-Tc or HTS) are materials that behave as superconductors at unusually high temperatures. The first high-Tc superconductor was discovered in 1986 by IBM researchers Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller, who were awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics “for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials”.

1970: The TN-Effect Liquid Crystal Display

In 1970, the physicists Martin Schadt and Wolfgang Helfrich invented the twisted nematic field effect (TN-effect) whilst working at Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, in Basel. This invention rapidly paved the way for commercial Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD), which are still in use today.

1905: Turbocharger

On the 13 November 1905 the patent of the turbocharger’s principle was granted to Alfred Büchi, a swiss engineer, and on the 16 November 1905 he received another patent for its application to internal combustion engines.

1929: Bloch Wave – Electron Waves in a Crystal

Named after Swiss physicist Felix Bloch, a Bloch wave (also called Bloch State; Bloch Function or Bloch Wave Function), is a type of wave function for a particle in a periodically-repeating environment, for example electrons moving in a semiconductor such as silicon (whose atoms form a crystal lattice). The application of Bloch’s theorem helps explain the formation of valence band and conduction bands in a semi-conductor.  A Bloch wave description also applies to any wave-like phenomenon in a periodic medium such as photonic crystals,phononic crystals and diffraction.