Spring into April and May by attending events in Basel, Geneva and Zurich!
Monthly Archives: February 2016
May 26 CEO Event Jean Claude Biver, LVMH Group, Hublot, TAG Heuer
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Myths About Dinosaurs & Startups in New INSEAD Research
The myth is that big corporations are slow, dumb dinosaurs waiting to be ‘disrupted’ .. but reality is not so simple.
INSEAD and 500 Startups partnered to find out How The World’s Biggest Companies Deal With The Startup Revolution. Switzerland figures prominently in the report and not just because the authors used a Swiss Army Knife as a metaphor to explain large company engagement patterns with startups.
In fact, Switzerland is one of the top three countries for large-sized company engagement with innovators.
The report co-author Khailee Ng, Managing Partner, 500 Startups, is a startup ecosystem expert who says that he paired up with the “academic firepower” of INSEAD to “cut through a dataset” of the top 500 companies in the Forbes Global 2000 ranking of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies by revenue, with the goal of discovering what they’ve been doing with startups and to find out more about successful collaborations.
Findings
- There is a “strong correlation between the rank of the corporation and the engagement with startups” and that the smaller the revenue, the weaker the engagement rate, according to one of the authors in CFO Innovation.
- 5 Swiss companies engaging with startups: Nestlé, UBS, ABB, Syngenta and Swisscom
- European companies are more likely to engage with startups, especially France (92%), Germany (71.4%) and Switzerland 71.4% , higher than Japan (56.8%), China (23.8%) and the US (45.5%).
Four Salamanders Awarded in Zurich

Salamander Award winner Gérard Despinoy (center) Leonidas Los (r) and Dean Mihov (l) Photo Credit (C) INSEAD NAA Switzerland
Four Salamanders, which recognize significant donations to the school, were awarded by Leonidas Los, MBA’75, Chairman of the INSEAD Alumni Fund, and Dean Mihov on the occasion of the INSEAD International Alumni Association bi-annual meeting held in Zürich in November 2015.
The recipients were Bernd Reuther (MBA’89J Switzerland), Guillaume Loth Demay (YMP S/F’05Sep, France), Gérard Despinoy (MBA’95J France), and Graham Hastie (MBA’95J Singapore). The ceremony was moderated by Joanne Shoveller, Associate Dean, Advancement and Alumni Relations.
The Dean awards Salamanders in recognition of cumulative donations.So far the Dean has awarded 50 Platinum, 71 Gold, and152 Sliver, and 419 Bronze Salamanders, and 696 Black
Pins, 139 Blue Pins and 2,081 Green Pins.
Platinum Salamander €200,000
Gold Salamander €100,000
Silver Salamander € 50,000
Bronze Salamander € 15,000
More on giving.insead.edu/gift
Impressions of Events in January 2016
Last month, both Geneva and Zurich had some great events and unique venues.
View photo album IMPRESSIONS JAN 2016 (PDF)