Transcript of the interview:
Antoine: Hello. Today on our podcast about innovation makers, I'm particularly proud to welcome Nicolas Durand. Nicolas, we've known each other for many years. I have deep respect for your work, particularly what you've accomplished at Abionic. To start this interview, I'd love for you to tell us a little about your background.
Nicolas: Thank you, Antoine — it's a pleasure to be here. My path is both very simple and quite eventful. When I was a kid, I had one dream: to become an entrepreneur. At 14, a friend and I set up a small IT company. It was an experience I genuinely loved. So I told myself I wanted to build a high-tech start-up, much like those coming out of Silicon Valley. And the best path to get there was EPFL — good studies, and access to unique technology. I studied microtechnology, and then decided a PhD might be a good move — not for academic reasons, but purely from an entrepreneurial standpoint. I chose the EPFL lab that produced the most start-ups, thinking it would put me in a pool of fellow entrepreneurs. And that's how everything began — at least, the Abionic story.
Antoine: What a journey. I'm a big fan. If you were to talk about innovation now — what does innovation mean to you?
Nicolas: For me, innovation means transforming an idea into value. It can be a product, a service, or a new way of operating. But the essence of innovation is creating something new, something ingenious, that ideally changes the world for the better.
Antoine: Is there a particular challenge where you thought: "This is where real innovation is going to happen"?
Nicolas: In the Abionic story, technology was the very first major challenge. With my colleague Iwan Märki, we truly started from scratch — from an idea that said: if we can force molecules into a nanoscopically sized channel, maybe we can achieve rapid diagnostics. And you have to understand that it's an aggregation of very different technologies: nanotechnology, chemistry, biology, embedded electronics, computer science, precision mechanics, biomedical optics. Each of these had its own challenges. And the real beauty of this story was finding the right people, the right experts, to make everything work together in the end.
Antoine: What an adventure! Today you do less engineering. Does that side of things — does it miss you?
Nicolas: Yes, a lot — because I love hands-on technology. I do it now in my spare time, as a passion. I have lots of small projects I try to develop in my basement, and I try to get my children involved in some of them too. It ranges from building an arcade game to a small panel showing traffic conditions. Right now I'm working on an AI project, building my own LLM system. There are so many small projects you can run in parallel, and it remains a passion. I like working in a company where innovation and technology matter.
Antoine: You need challenges, ultimately?
Nicolas: Yes. Technological challenges especially — it's something I truly love.
Antoine: You've done a PhD, built a company, and now you work at the biotech campus in Geneva while supporting the CVCI in various ways. Do you see a common thread in innovation across SMEs, multinationals, and academia?
Nicolas: The common thread in everything you just described is really impact. Our professional lives — and life in general — are very short. We need to make the most of them by doing things that have a positive impact on others. You mentioned my involvement at the CVCI: we're typically in an environment where you can't just complain that the framework conditions aren't perfect — you also have to act. That's what organisations like the chamber are there for. Even if the impact takes a very long time — political lobbying by definition takes years before anything measurable happens — the sooner you start, the sooner you'll see results. So we don't despair; we just keep moving forward.
Antoine: Thank you for your commitment. We ask every one of our innovation makers the same question: in a single word — what is innovation?
Nicolas: The word that would characterise innovation for me is ingenuity. Because to me, that's creativity applied. Innovation can happen anywhere: early in research, in development, in translational application, or even in the way a company serves its clients. Ingenuity, for me, is the right word.
Antoine: I love it. A huge thank you for being here today. For anyone interested, you'll find plenty of information at abionic.com. Looking forward to continuing to work together.
Nicolas: Thank you so much for the invitation — and congratulations again on everything you do at FiveCo. It's impressive.