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Department of Finance

Thomas Puschmann wins Innovation Booster for Sustainable Finance

Thomas Puschmann secures the Innovation Booster for "Sustainable Digital Finance," accelerating radical innovations at the intersection of sustainability and digitalization in the financial industry to address current challenges with innovative solutions.

The Innovation Booster (IB) "Sustainable Digital Finance" aims to accelerate radical innovations that foster sustainability in the financial system by harnessing innovative technology. As the financial industry is currently being fundamentally redesigned by sustainability and digitalization in a twin transformation, this initiative aims to create novel concepts at the intersection of these two transformational topics. While Fintech has reached the number one position in venture capital funding in Switzerland over the last years according to Startup Ticker, most of the start-ups in Sustainable Digital Finance are still premature. 

Therefore, the IB focuses on professionalizing the so-called ideation phase, the earliest phase of innovations that precedes the implementation of innovations with a strong focus on research and problem identification which requires intense collaboration among different stakeholders. Today, companies spend only around 15% on average of their overall R&D budget on ideation and collaborations in this early phase are often weak.

The IB "Sustainable Digital Finance" is supported by Innosuisse with the goal of developing more competences for collaborations in the field of innovation in Switzerland. Stakeholders from business, research and society join forces to respond to current challenges with innovative solutions. For this, the IB "Sustainable Digital Finance” integrates all relevant stakeholders, such as the Green Digital Finance Alliance, Startup Academy, Swiss Fintech Innovations, Swisscom, Swiss Banking, State Secretariat for International Finance, Green Fintech Network over a neutral collaboration platform to develop and co-create novel approaches.