CNO Panel 2018: Switzerland is still too much "back" for the future
The CNO Panel has been the Swiss platform for top management for 18 years, featuring keynote speeches, workshops and plenty of space for personal networking. It offers relevant statements from science, politics and practice in the relaxed atmosphere of a gala evening. On October 30, it was that time once again.
"Back to the Future - Utopia or Reality?" was the theme of this year's series of events organized by sieber & partners. With this, the CNO Panel 2018 challenged the approximately 400 participants to ask themselves partly delicate but highly interesting questions, such as: "How will we move from Zurich to Ostermundigen?", "Will we be cared for by robots?", "Is it still necessary to learn languages?", "Who will do my job?", "What would happen if there were self-driving cars?" In workshops, presentations and meeting points, experts and participants jointly approached such acute future questions - and solutions.
Too much "organized" in place of open platforms
Pascal Sieber, founder and organizer of the CNO Panel, draws a rather mixed conclusion when asked how "future-proof" Switzerland is: "The state and state-related companies are lagging behind current developments. ten to twenty years behind. In the private sector, we are about average." In other words, "Back to the Future" seems to apply almost programmatically to our country. However, Pascal Sieber names a few Swiss companies that offer very advanced solutions for digitalization. "One example is Landis + Gyr, for example: the company is a leader in solutions for Energy-as-a-Service. But this is precisely what is currently not feasible in Switzerland, as many state-affiliated energy suppliers want to secure their sinecures," Sieber laments. Overall, he sees Switzerland as still too dominated by state-affiliated companies - in telecommunications, for example - and monopolies. Where open platforms are emerging in other countries, Switzerland is still too "organized" in many respects and prefers to rely on sluggish proprietary solutions.
Not just talking about digital business models, but acting on them
In his keynote address that evening, Jörg Eugster talked about what the digital future might actually look like. The successful internet entrepreneur and future missionary brought the digital megatrends closer in an informative and entertaining way at the CNO Panel 2018 by telling directly from his digital life. The subsequent roundtable discussion "Three Swiss in the Global Market" showed that there are many Swiss entrepreneurs who compete with their software in the international and even global market - even though the Swiss software scene is often referred to as the research and development scene. Three entrepreneurs gave insight into their experience: Dorian Selz, CEO and founder of Squirro, Jens Thuesen, VR president of BSI Software and Cristian Grossmann, CEO and co-founder of Beekeeper. This company has developed an employee app that allows blue-collar workers without their own PC workstation, for example, to better connect. This simplifies the exchange of information - software or IT "only" serves as a means to an end here. With solutions like these, digitization will increasingly permeate the working world of the future. Pascal Sieber hopes that events like the CNO Panel can become a kind of "melting point" where people not only talk about the possibilities of digital business models, but also actively act on them.
More information and impressions
