SwissCyber Initiative: Mapping Switzerland’s Cybersecurity R&D Ecosystem
The SwissCyber Initiative (SCI) maps Switzerland’s cybersecurity ecosystem and examines current and future gaps in cybersecurity R&D, with a particular focus on companies and key cybersecurity subdomains. Combining a nationwide stakeholder survey with reworked and cleaned structured data from sources such as Crunchbase and ZEFIX, the project identifies perceived R&D gaps, emerging technologies and threat priorities, and the characteristics and geographical distribution of active organizations. It also reveals how companies are financed and by whom, offering an initial perspective on the digital sovereignty of Switzerland’s cybersecurity sector. These insights are integrated into a web-based platform that enables interactive exploration and comparison through smart filters. The presentation will highlight key findings from the R&D-gap analysis and demonstrate two use cases illustrating how survey insights, ecosystem data, and financing information can be combined to support evidence-based analysis of Switzerland’s cybersecurity landscape.
AI Summary
Disclaimer: This session information was generated with the help of AI.
The information has been reviewed and refined by the Swiss Cyber Storm team before publishing.
The SwissCyber Initiative consolidates scattered, sometimes unreliable data on Swiss-connected cyber security providers into one unified database and a public platform with maps and smart filters. Combining Cyber-Defence Campus market monitoring, the Swiss commercial registry, Common Crawl text mining and a nationwide expert survey, it reveals strong geographical and investment concentration, heavy reliance on foreign capital and a perceived misalignment between research and development (R&D) and actual needs of the society. Natural language processing (NLP) based exposure scores and an innovation index help separate genuine innovators from firms merely operating in the cyber space, supporting evidence-based policy, investment and procurement decisions.
Video chapters
0:00Introduction to the SwissCyber Initiative1:39Scattered data and project goals4:54Data sources and integration pipeline7:36Platform demonstration10:29Key findings from ecosystem data12:00Survey insights compared with the data14:47Exposure score, innovation index and taxonomy18:05Dissemination, ongoing work and next steps21:04Call for survey participation and team22:31Q&A on data access and investment
Key facts
- The SwissCyber Initiative is a two-year project funded by the Swiss Confederation's State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), led by HES-SO Valais-Wallis in collaboration with the Cyber-Defence Campus.
- In the project's survey, 37% of respondents perceive cyber security R&D in Switzerland as not aligned with needs.
- The platform is intended to remain live for at least five years, with a data snapshot as of Q4 2026 and semi-supervised self-updates.
- The stakeholder survey was structured using the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) cyber security taxonomy, which the team found a better trade-off than generic industry codes that are either too coarse or outdated for cyber security.
Ideas
- Any organization with a 'leg' in Switzerland, whether through investment, acquisition, a parent company or local employees, is included, giving a broad view of national strengths and weaknesses that is deliberately distinct from a sovereignty assessment.
- Common Crawl web data is mined with natural language processing (NLP) and entity resolution, drawing on news coverage as well as company self-descriptions, to classify organizations more accurately than vendor data alone.
- A cyber security exposure score distinguishes consultancies and legal firms that merely operate in the cyber area from companies genuinely pushing the boundaries of innovation.
- Because private companies need not disclose R&D spending, an innovation index ranks firms by percentile using exposure score, company age, total funding and the date of the last funding round as a proxy.
- A future validated 'Swissness' score, ideally examining the whole supply chain, could tell public procurement bodies which cyber security providers are truly Swiss.
Keywords
- SwissCyber Initiative
- cyber security ecosystem
- digital sovereignty
- foreign investments
- research and development
- Common Crawl
Quotes
- “We do have a lot of information and those informations are really scattered all over the place.”
- “70% of our respondents believe that lack of investment is actually hindering the cyber security development in Switzerland.”
- “That's not to say that there is not enough R&D. Innovative companies do allocate capital for R&D. The problem is that this allocation is not optimal according to our respondents.”
- “We are lacking local investments at an early stage of the companies.”
Recommendations
- Contribute to the SwissCyber Initiative's one-minute census, and optionally the longer survey of up to 20 minutes, to improve the evidence base on Switzerland's cyber security ecosystem.
- Make greater day-to-day use of available cyber security frameworks; respondents showed surprisingly limited knowledge and use of them.
- Use the platform's smart filters, such as dependence on foreign investment, to inform policy, investment or procurement decisions with consolidated evidence rather than fragmented sources (inferred from the platform demonstration).
Resources
- Common Crawl — Website — Underpins the cyber security exposure score and helps fill gaps left by commercial data vendors.
- JRC European Cybersecurity Taxonomy — Framework — Offers granular cyber security categories and allows comparison with earlier research using the same taxonomy.
- Technology Market Monitoring (TMM) 2.0 — Tool — Provides the market monitoring foundation for the unified Swiss cyber security ecosystem database.
About the speaker
Dr. Loïc Maréchal
Scientific Collaborator
at
HES-SO Valais-Wallis (IEM)
Dr. Loïc Maréchal is a Scientific Collaborator at the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Management, HES-SO Valais-Wallis. His current research applies financial methods to estimate the costs of cyberattacks and to assess cybersecurity-related firms. He has taught finance at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Geneva, ESSEC Business School, and Les Roches. With over 10 years of experience in commodity markets, including work on trading desks and PhD research, he also has a strong interest in machine learning and market microstructure. He is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
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