Fribourg’s official magazine devotes its 2026 edition to the start-up mindset

Unveiled at the Marly Innovation Center, the 2026 edition of fribourg.swiss, the official magazine of the Fribourg Development Agency, examines the culture that drives start-ups and the ecosystem that supports their growth in the canton.

fribourg.swiss, the official magazine of the Fribourg Development Agency (FDA), has published its 2026 edition under the title “The Startup Mindset”. Covering research and technology transfer, business support, innovation sites and collaboration with established companies, it examines the many facets of the canton’s start-up scene and how that mindset extends well beyond young companies themselves.

Start-ups play an important role in Fribourg’s economy, whether they emerge from academic research or from the industrial sector, and they operate within an ecosystem that has expanded considerably in recent years. According to Olivier Curty, State Councillor in charge of economic affairs, start-ups bring the energy and capacity for experimentation that an economy needs to reinvent itself, and to succeed they can draw on “Fribourg’s close-knit and exceptionally well-connected ecosystem”.

Different paths, a shared mindset

The magazine looks at how the mindset evolves as companies grow. Bcomp, which now employs 80 people, describes how the agility of its early days has to be balanced with the processes required of an industrial company. Venturi Lab, by contrast, never went through a start-up phase but applies principles commonly associated with start-ups, including short cycles of design, testing and improvement. The complementarity between young and established companies is illustrated by the partnership between Overney Technologie and the family-owned SME Zbinden Posieux, which together turned an innovation for the agricultural sector into an industrially viable product, one contributing the concept and technological expertise, the other its production capacity and R&D experience.

For Jerry Krattiger, Managing Director of the Fribourg Development Agency, this diversity is a key component of economic development, with start-ups part of the mix alongside SMEs and large companies. That diversity is underpinned by a support network covering the different stages of company development: Fri Up assists entrepreneurs, universities and competence centers such as ChemTech help bridge research and industrial production, and innovation sites including AgriCo, bluefactory, Le Vivier and the Marly Innovation Center provide environments tailored to companies’ needs.

Launch at the Marly Innovation Center

The edition was presented on September 23 at the Marly Innovation Center. After welcoming remarks by Jerry Krattiger, Mathieu Piller of the Marly Innovation Center, Olivier Curty and Noam Rey of Bank CIC (Switzerland), the magazine’s principal partner since 2026, discussed entrepreneurship and the start-up mindset. Innovation advisor Marc Pauchard then presented aspects of the start-up mindset that SMEs can draw on, before a panel titled “What Startups Can Teach Us” with business angel Brigitte Baumann, founder of efino; Sarah Cattin, CTO and co-founder of Xemperia; Ciril Stebler, CEO and co-founder of velocorner.ch; and Yann Steulet, Managing Director of Fri Up.

Launched in 2001 as Fribourg Network Freiburg and rebranded in 2025, the magazine appears annually, digitally in English, French and German and in print in English with a run of 2,000 copies. The 2026 articles also feature Bcomp, the Bewe Lab at the University of Fribourg, Bloom Biorenewables and Seprify, CertX, ChemTech and Villars Maître Chocolatier.