HSG Founder of the Year 2016

21 March 2016. The prize awarded by the Werner Jackstädt Foundation is worth CHF 10,000.

2000 shops within six years

On is a Swiss sports company which manufactures and distributes running shoes with a cushioning effect produced by hollow sole elements. HSG alumnus Caspar Coppetti founded the company together with two friends in Zurich in 2010. After six years, the jogging shoes are available in more than 2,000 specialist shops worldwide and have been awarded, among other things, the ISPO Brand New Award for Innovation in Sport, the 2013 Swiss Design Prize and latterly the 2015/16 ISPO Gold Award for the best performance shoe.

The Entrepreneurship Day is part of the HSG Founder Garage series of events and this year took place within the framework of the SmartSummit founders’ conference. In workshops and lectures, this format provides company founders, investors and students with space for an exchange of ideas and experience on the campus of the University of St.Gallen.

Previous winners

In previous years, the prize was awarded to Laura Behrens Wu (2015), founder of the Shippo company, which offers a distribution software, to Alexander Graubner-Müller (2014), founder of the mini loan platform Kreditech, to Soma Analytics founder Johann Huber (2013) for his anti-stress app, to DeinDeal.ch founder Adrian Locher (2012) and to Dr. Alexander Ilic (2011), founder of Dacuda, which had developed a scanning computer mouse. The founders’ competition is supported by HSG Alumni and researchers of the Business Innovation profile area at the University of St.Gallen.