The participation of the canton of St.Gallen in the Switzerland Innovation network by way of Innovation Park East is set to strengthen the economic area of eastern Switzerland. After intensive pre-examination of a dossier on the Innovation Park East project, the St.Gallen government opted to formally submit its application to the Switzerland Innovation foundation, which is responsible for evaluating the content of the submissions. At the request of the Board of Trustees, the Federal Council will ultimately decide whether St.Gallen will be nominated as a location within the Swiss Innovation Park network, according to a press release.
The planned Innovation Park East is designed to connect companies and research entities, for example in the field of health and medical technology and the MEM industry. A total of 320,000 people across Switzerland are employed in the Swiss mechanical, electrical and metal (MEM) industry. In the canton of St.Gallen, the focus will be on optic and photonic projects in particular.
For collaboration with elite research institutions, the threshold is often very high for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular. One task for the Innovation Park East will be to reduce this. The hope of the project’s developers is to create “an efficient innovation ecosystem that enables scientific and economic cooperation within a company’s value chain”, as outlined in the press text.
The Innovation Park is to be housed at the building complex of the St.Galler Tagblatt newspaper on Fürstenlandstrasse in St.Gallen adjacent to Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa).
