Entrepreneurship Awards as a Source of National Innovation Capability: A Case from Switzerland

The foundation of new companies has attracted world-wide attention for the past decades, as the emergence of small firms has been increasingly regarded as the spine of a healthy economy. In order to support entrepreneurship, most Western countries have included several supporting features into their national (and regional) systems of innovations (NSI). In addition to most conventional support instruments, there exist a variety of more concentrated initiatives or instruments to support entrepreneurship. An example of such can be observed in the initiative of "venture - companies for tomorrow", a Swiss-wide business plan contest. This research is aiming to investigate whether such a support initiative does have a positive perceived impact on the creation of new companies. As a first step a qualitative study (n=115) was conducted to analyze the impact of the initiative on participating companies in 2006. Initial results show that the importance of networking, feedback and coaching was perceived to be the most useful features of the initiative. Also, the presence of a sparring partner was seen to be helpful in writing a business plan. Additionally, it can be concluded that one third of the respondents had founded their own company after the competition, which indicates a positive overall impact of the competition in its aim of fostering entrepreneurship.