The future of construction and mobility emerges through collaboration – interview with Maximilian Richter, Switzerland Innovation Park Central

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

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

Successful innovation also requires suitable framework conditions. Industry, academia, and the public sector must be brought together so that knowledge, skills, and resources can complement each other. We enable this through workshops, joint formats, and above all through concrete projects in which teams collaborate closely. There are many ideas – the decisive step is to put them into practice.

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

From your perspective, what are the biggest hurdles and risks in Switzerland when it comes to turning ideas into market-ready products and services?

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

A central risk is financing: projects often lose momentum when funding periods end and no follow-up funding is planned. The overarching challenge is to build stable human, organizational, and financial structures so that early ideas can actually develop into market-ready products.

How do you define innovation at the Switzerland Innovation Park – is it mainly about technological innovations 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 the Switzerland Innovation Park, however, innovation goes further: it primarily emerges through new forms of collaboration. In complex fields such as construction and mobility, innovations do not arise in isolation in a laboratory, but through interaction.

Which technological advances or collaboration models are currently shaping the construction and mobility sectors – and what developments do you hope for as a result?

To ensure that innovation does not stop after initial funding, we deliberately continue to support projects so that early ideas can develop into 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 collaborate with companies at an early stage, synergies emerge that link scientific insights with practical implementation. This allows ideas to systematically evolve towards product-market fit and enables the creation of start-ups and scalable solutions that sustainably transform the construction and mobility sectors.

Why is it important to promote innovation in Switzerland, particularly 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 – beyond individual modes of transport and cantonal borders. New technologies such as AI and autonomous driving offer great 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 essential.

Internationally, Switzerland has a unique starting position: it is one of the most innovative countries and has a highly integrated transport system. This allows new approaches not only to be developed, but also tested in real-world operations and then scaled globally – with the potential to set international standards.

What kind of support do you wish for from the Swiss rail and mobility industry so that local innovations can successfully gain a foothold in the market?

For Swiss innovations in the mobility sector to succeed in the market, a structure is needed that connects stakeholders and consistently supports early project ideas. This is why, together with Swissrail, we are building a national Mobility Innovation Hub at the Switzerland Innovation Park – a place where industry, academia, the public sector, and start-ups work together, share data, test prototypes, and develop solutions to market maturity. The hub is open to everyone: individuals and companies with project ideas can actively participate and receive up to CHF 25,000 in funding to start their projects. In this way, we are creating an ecosystem in which new mobility solutions emerge more quickly, are 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.