Research & Development Government Tenders in Switzerland

How public bodies contract for research they cannot specify in advance

Research procurement has a structural problem: the buyer is purchasing an answer to a question, and if the answer were known the contract would be unnecessary. Public bodies deal with this by buying in phases. A feasibility or concept phase is awarded to several suppliers in parallel, each paid a modest fixed sum; a subset is then funded to prototype; a smaller subset again reaches demonstration. Each phase is a competition among the survivors of the last, so a bidder should read the notice for the phase structure and the progression criteria before pricing anything.

Intellectual property is the term that decides whether the contract is worth winning. Arrangements range from full assignment of results to the buyer, through a licence to the buyer with the supplier retaining ownership and the right to commercialise elsewhere, to background and foreground IP splits that must be catalogued before work starts. Development-focused schemes often deliberately leave ownership with the supplier so that a market can form around the result, while procurement of research for internal use tends toward assignment. The two produce very different bid economics.

Evaluation weights the proposal's scientific and technical merit, the team's record, and the credibility of the risk assessment, and it rewards candour about what might fail. Deliverables are reports, data and demonstrations rather than products, so acceptance criteria are written around defined technical readiness levels or measurable milestones. Where human participants, animals, personal data or dual-use technology are involved, ethical approval and export control clearance are conditions precedent with their own timetables, and they are a common cause of a project starting months after award.

This section describes how this category is bought generally, across the public buyers that publish it. The figures elsewhere on this page are measured for this market alone.

Who buys research & development in Switzerland?

GlobalGov holds 46 research & development records from 36 distinct buying organisations in Switzerland. The most frequent publishers are ILO (6 records); Epfl-scientific Equipment (4 records); Centrale Commune D'achats (cca) (2 records); Office fédéral de la santé publique OFSP (2 records); Bundesamt für Wohnungswesen BWO (1 record); Centrale d'achats et d'ingénierie biomédicale des hôpitaux universitaires Vaud-Genève (1 record). Between them the 6 largest account for 35% of everything published, so buying here is spread across many separate authorities.

How long do bidders get to respond to research & development tenders in Switzerland?

Across the 13 Switzerland research & development notices that publish both a publication date and a closing date, the median response window is 38 days. A quarter of them allowed 21 days or fewer and a quarter stayed open for more than 42. Short turnarounds are the exception rather than the rule here: only 1 (7.7%) closed within a fortnight of being published.

How often are research & development tenders published in Switzerland?

Switzerland published 17 notices in this category in the last twelve months. Over the last three years there were 17, spread across 21 separate months of activity since 1 December 2016. August is historically the busiest month. The most recent was published 31 August 2026.

How does Switzerland compare with other research & development markets?

Among the 35 countries where GlobalGov holds a comparable research & development market, Switzerland ranks 29th by number of records. The largest is Australia (13,059 records against 46 here). Within Switzerland itself, research & development is the 41st largest of the 56 procurement categories tracked here.

Where do the Switzerland research & development records on this page come from?

These 46 records are collected from 2 official sources: TED (39), UN Global Marketplace (7). GlobalGov is an independent aggregator and is not affiliated with any of them; each record links back to the notice on its issuing portal. The set is rebuilt nightly, and the counts on this page were taken on 2026-10-01.

Open Research & Development tenders in Switzerland

Showing 3 of the 3 notices open in this category today. Openness uses the same definition as the Switzerland market page: active, not marked awarded, cancelled, closed or expired, and either closing in the future or published within the last 90 days with no stated closing date.

Other procurement categories in Switzerland

Research & Development procurement in other markets