Wirtschaftsförderung Region Olten and its partners have the vision to promote the Region of Olten as an attractive location for businesses in life sciences. One of the instruments is the creation of the Swissbiolabs Start-up Challenge, which should attract domestic and foreign European start-ups in the field of diagnostics to come to Olten. By locating start-ups in the region of Olten, it hopes to create an entrepreneurial environment, which is believed to positively contribute to the growth of the regional economy.

The project team reviewed existing challenges to gain an overview of the competitive landscape of start-up challenges in Switzerland. These were summarised in a database giving an insight of about 19 start-up challenges and revealing how they are all unique in their own sense. From the database the three most successful challenges were identified and analysed according to the building blocks of the Business Model Canvas. From the resulting good practice we formulated recommendations for the concept development of the Swissbiolabs Start-Up Challenge.

The group was able to elaborate two major final deliverables for Wirtschaftsförderung Region Olten. These were the analysis of the three most successful start-up challenges from the database and recommendations according to the business model canvas for the concept of the upcoming Swissbiolabs Start-Up Challenge.The three challenges were chosen based on the success factor rankings from the database of 19 challenges. Hence, the analysis identified good practices from these start-up competitors, which provided the basis for the recommendation for the Swissbiolabs Start-Up Challenge. The recommendations were organised in the form of six predetermined building blocks of the business model canvas which were Key Activities, Key Partners, Value Proposition, Revenue Stream, Channels and Customer Segment as agreed upon by the client. After the presentation of the final result, Wirtschaftsförderung Region Olten and the group had the chance to discussthe recommendations in more detail. The result of the project will be taken into consideration by the client for the implementation of the Swissbiolabs Start-Up Challenge.