Shaping Switzerland’s Digital Future
Professor Elgar Fleisch is among the Digital Shapers of 2019, the 100 most influential Swiss citizens in the area of digitalisation as selected by Digitalswitzerland.
external page Digitalswitzerland is a Switzerland-wide, multi-stakeholder initiative that aims to strengthen Switzerland’s position as a leading innovation hub and thereby benefit the entire spectrum of Swiss industry. Its fourth selection of “Digital Shapers”, divided into 11 categories, is widely recognised, and is featured in articles such as this one in external page Bilanz. This year, Professor Elgar Fleisch was honoured as one of the top ten Thinkers.
Professor Elgar Fleisch is honoured in the category Thinker
The Austrian-Swiss researcher Elgar Fleisch has linked research with business since the beginning of his academic career. Fleisch is not only interested in the extent to which the real and digital worlds are melding together every more strongly; he would also like to develop functioning business models on that basis. That he can accomplish this is due to – among other things – the fact that he now holds a double professorship of Information Management and external page Operations Management at ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen (HSG). Because his research often involves collaboration with businesses, he also serves on several boards of directors. For example, he is active in the insurance companies Mobiliar and Uniqa as well as in the industrial concern Robert Bosch.
One of his most important projects today is the external page Center for Digital Health Interventions (CDHI) – a joint initiative of the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics at ETH Zurich and the Institute of Technology Management at HSG. An interdisciplinary team of computer and social scientists partners with medical experts to design behavioural, scalable and self-improving digital health interventions based on digital biomarker and digital coaching research – so-called “digital pills” – that are both effective and cost-efficient.
A child suffering from asthma, for example, might receive a Chatbot that interacts with him or her around eight times per day. The software also registers if the child coughs too much several nights in a row, and can react accordingly. In this way digital systems can supervise and support patients and thereby help to reduce health care costs, particularly in the area of chronic illnesses.
With his ETH and HSG students, Fleisch is currently studying the Internet of Things. At ETH his course “Mastering Digital Business Models” is part of the MSc and MAS core curricula in Management, Technology, and Economics. As a result of his research and teaching Fleisch and his group have co-founded a number of successful spin-offs, including external page Intellion AG, external page Amphiro AG, Dacuda AG and external page Allthings AG.