The future of construction and mobility is shaped through collaboration – Interview

Dr. Maximilian Richter is Deputy CEO of Switzerland Innovation Park Central. Switzerland Innovation is an association for companies, start-ups, universities and public institutions working together on the future of the construction and mobility industries.

Dear Maximilian, you work at Switzerland Innovation Park with the goal of turning research into market-ready products and services. How do you achieve this, what framework conditions are needed – and what are the key success factors?

Market-ready products emerge through clear priorities, the right partnerships and a structured approach. At Switzerland Innovation Park, we deliberately focus on two industries: construction and mobility – fields with high societal relevance and direct benefits.

Successful innovation also requires strong framework conditions: business, academia and the public sector must be brought together so that knowledge, skills and resources can complement one another. We enable this through workshops, joint formats and, above all, through concrete projects in which teams collaborate. There are many ideas – the crucial step is to put them into action.

Our role is that of an orchestrator: we connect the right stakeholders, create structure, ensure functioning innovation processes and make sure no one is excluded. This is how real impact emerges from ideas and research results.

What do you see as the biggest hurdles and risks in Switzerland when it comes to turning ideas into market-ready products and services?

In the early stages, it is particularly challenging to bring the right people together for the long term and keep them motivated – especially in the construction and mobility sectors with their long, cost-intensive innovation cycles. Cantonal boundaries make it difficult to scale many mobility solutions and prevent good ideas from achieving their full impact.

A key risk is financing: projects often lose momentum when funding periods end and no follow-on financing has been planned. The overarching challenge is to build stable personnel, organisational and financial structures so that early ideas can actually become market-ready products.

“In complex areas such as construction and mobility, innovations do not emerge in isolation in a laboratory, but through interplay.”

How do you define innovation at Switzerland Innovation Park – is it primarily about technological advances or also about new forms of collaboration?

Traditionally, innovation means successfully bringing new products or services to market for which there is a clear willingness to pay. At Switzerland Innovation Park, however, innovation goes further: innovation arises above all through new forms of collaboration. In complex areas such as construction and mobility, innovations do not emerge in isolation in a laboratory, but through interplay.

Which technological advances or collaboration models are currently shaping the construction and mobility sectors – and what developments do you hope will come from them?

To ensure that innovation does not stop after the first round of funding, we deliberately continue to support projects so that early ideas become products and services with sustainable business models. For this purpose, we have created additional investment vehicles to support teams beyond the early phase.

The combination of research and an entrepreneurial mindset is particularly effective. When researchers cooperate with companies at an early stage, synergies emerge that connect scientific insights with practical implementation. This allows ideas to develop systematically towards product–market fit and enables the creation of start-ups as well as scalable solutions that sustainably transform the construction and mobility world.

Why is it important to promote innovation in Switzerland, specifically in the mobility sector, and what role does Switzerland play internationally?

Innovation in the mobility sector is crucial for Switzerland because mobility must be considered holistically – across individual modes of transport and cantonal boundaries. New technologies such as AI and autonomous driving offer major opportunities: more efficient use of infrastructure, new business models and more sustainable forms of mobility. To unlock these potentials, targeted support and structures for rapid testing and further development are needed.

Internationally, Switzerland is in a unique position: it is one of the most innovative countries and has a highly integrated transport system. This makes it possible not only to develop new approaches, but also to test them in real operations and then scale them globally – with the potential to set international standards.

What kind of support would you like from the Swiss rail and mobility industry so that innovations developed here can successfully gain a foothold in the market?

For Swiss innovations in the mobility sector to successfully gain a foothold in the market, we need a structure that connects stakeholders and consistently supports early project ideas. That is why we are building a national Mobility Innovation Hub together with Swissrail at Switzerland Innovation Park – a place where business, academia, the public sector and start-ups collaborate, share data, test prototypes and develop solutions to market readiness. The Hub is open to everyone: individuals and companies with project ideas can actively participate and receive start-up funding of up to CHF 25,000 for project initiation. This creates an ecosystem in which new mobility solutions can emerge faster, be tested and achieve international impact.

Thank you very much for this interview!

The interview was published in the December 2025 issue of Swissrail’s association magazine “express”.

You can read the full issue here.

Note on the translation: this text was translated using AI and checked by us. If you find any mistakes or something that is not clear, please let us know.