Lightium, enshift and Swiss Cluster win Swiss Economic Award 2026

(CONNECT) Lightium, enshift and Swiss Cluster are the winners of this year's Swiss Economic Award. With this competition, the Swiss Economic Forum(SEF) and the award partners Helbling, Swisscom and UBS promote young business talent in Switzerland. As part of the SEF, which took place on June 4th and June 5th in Interlaken, nine finalists presented their business models to the main jury and the audience. The winners of the three categories are now presented by the organizers in a press release.

The Deeptech/Life Science category was won by Lightium, based in the Bio-Technopark Schlieren-Zurich. The company develops photonic chips based on thin-film lithium niobate and operates one of the few chip factories with open access to date. The technology enables particularly fast and energy-efficient optical data transmission, for example for data centers, telecommunications, quantum computing and other high-performance technologies. The jury praised Lightium "for its technological depth and the potential to build a central infrastructure for future optical systems".

The winner in the services category is enshift. The Baar-based Energytech company develops solutions for the decentralized energy supply of properties and sites. Founded in 2022, the company plans, finances, implements and operates on-site systems for photovoltaics, charging infrastructure, battery storage and energy management and sells the energy directly to the owners or tenants of the buildings. The jury praised "in particular the holistic approach with which enshift is making the energy transition in the building sector economically viable".

Swiss Cluster won the Production/Commercial category. The spin-off of the Bern University of Applied Sciences and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) in Thun, founded in 2020, brings highly specialized thin-film coating into a flexible, industry-compatible format. The modular systems from the Spiez-based company combine various coating technologies and can be configured according to the application. This gives research institutes, laboratories and industrial development departments access to sophisticated coating processes without having to use large, rigid systems. The jury was impressed by "the technical precision, the modular approach and the concrete benefits for materials research, nanotechnology and industrial development". ce/mm