Technopark Zürich — ETH Spin-off & Deep-Tech Transfer Campus

Technopark Zürich opened in 1993 in the city's Industriequartier as Switzerland's first technology park, a privately funded foundation created to give university research institutes, spin-offs and established companies shared space and services on one 47,000 m² site.

Results: the campus now hosts around 300 companies and organisations employing roughly 2,800 people, drawing heavily on ETH Zurich's technology-transfer pipeline. ETH's own spin-off study (published October 2020, its third since 2008) found around 500 spin-offs founded to date, with a sampled cohort of 145 firms generating about 4,500 full-time jobs and nearly CHF 900 million in 2017 revenue; roughly 93% of ETH spin-offs survive past five years, and about 10% have completed an exit. ETH set a record of 43 new spin-offs in 2023 (12 AI-related, 8 biotech/pharma), attracting notable follow-on investment such as GetYourGuide (CHF 70m) and ANYbotics (CHF 50m).

Governance: Technopark Zürich is run as an independent foundation with two divisions — one managing the real-estate and facilities, the other dedicated to strengthening Swiss competitiveness and job creation — with the City of Zurich approving successive building expansions (2011–2012) as the campus grew.

Why it's a good practice: by co-locating ETH's technology-transfer pipeline with commercial tenants in one purpose-built campus since 1993, Zurich created a durable, self-funded piece of urban infrastructure for turning university IP into companies, rather than a time-limited grant programme.

Read more: https://www.technopark.ch/en/

Read the full analysis: https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2020/10/spin-off-study.html