Entrepreneurship awards in Switzerland and the effect on the development of start-ups and SMEs: an empirical study about swiss awards, the award-winners and those who refused to take part in the award-contests

During the last seven years the amount of awards for SMEs and start-ups has increased rapidly in Switzerland. The Swiss Office of Statistics observed an increase of start-ups during the same period of time. Today, there exit many different wordings for the awards to consider (e.g. Innovation Award, SME-Oscar, Entrepreneurship-Award, Cunning Fox, Golden Apple). Most of these awards tend to reward the economic efficiency, the financial success, or the degree of innovation of the firm. However, there are also numerous awards which reward, for example, the social contribution, the good governance, or the ethic behaviour of the firm. At the same time, the competition among awarding institutions has been increasing. Not a week goes by without regional activities or a national-wide conference for SMEs where an award is granted. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly difficult to have an overview over all the numerous awards and the increasing number of laureates. In addition, scant research has been conducted to date about the influence of awards on the winning enterprises. This study is inductive and is designed to provide a point of comparison to the growing number of awards and their impact on SMEs. The study has three main goals. First, we aim to provide an overview over all the awards in Switzerland. Second, we seek to understand why many seemingly 'successful' entrepreneurs and hidden champions who refuse to take part to these award competitions. Third, we aim to identify the perceived benefits of the awards from the entrepreneur perspective. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 84 prize winners and 50 entrepreneurs who refused to participate to award competitions. The prize winners were initially selected from the main award competition held in Switzerland since the mid 90s. We found that more than half of the prize winning SMEs are still very in business today. Therefore, we focused our research towards a representative group of award winners from the last four years.