In order to establish an audit program tailored to the industry specifics, the industry itself must be understood from the bottom to the top. Further, besides the descriptive industry characteristics, the specificities of the financial statements and their informativeness have to be analyzed and interpreted. This has not yet been done in the Swiss biotechnology environment and is therefore a requirement for a future biotech audit program.

In a literature review, the biotech industry was extensively outlined. Further, the authors focused on gathering insights about industry-specific risks. A list of all Swiss biotech startups with information about their fields of activity, location, age, management and size was compiled as a base to gather further primary data about the industry, e.g., in form of a survey. Further, an empirical analysis was conducted with a sample of listed Swiss biotech companies to examine the relationship between intellectual capital disclosure and financial statement informativeness.

The literature review covers important, industry-specific knowledge such as life-cycle and business model specificities and the role of strategic alliances in the Swiss biotechnology industry. Several operational and financial risks are explained and their importance for the biotechnology industry was outlined. The gathered data about Swiss biotech companies provides various characteristics of the companies and provides a resource to address companies for further research. The thesis summarizes the literature on financial statement informativeness and voluntary intellectual capital disclosure of Swiss biotechnology companies. A statistical analysis suggests that companies with a lower financial statement informativeness tend to disclose more information about their intellectual capital.