Quantum Industry Day in Switzerland 2026

What QIDiS actually is: a national meeting point, not a trade fair

QIDiS is small by design. At roughly 140 attendees over a single day, it is closer to an invitation-sized national gathering than to a commercial quantum conference with exhibition halls and vendor booths. The format is built around plenary content plus organised networking rather than around a sales floor, and the audience is drawn largely from a country where the entire quantum sector is small enough that most senior figures already know each other. The value proposition is coverage rather than scale: on one day, in one hall, a company can meet the federal innovation agency, two university research centres, a national research programme, a corporate research lab and two commercial quantum vendors.

That also sets the boundary of what QIDiS is not. It is not a research conference in the sense of peer-reviewed proceedings, and it is not a procurement event. Its centre of gravity is the handover point between publicly funded quantum research and companies trying to build products on top of it.

Who runs QIDiS: the co-organising consortium

The organiser list is unusually long for an event of this size, and it is the single most informative thing about the day. Nine organisations are named as co-organisers, with three further partners supporting.

Read as a group, the list spans the full path a Swiss quantum result has to travel: two university centres and a national research programme at the origin, an applied research organisation and a corporate lab in the middle, two product companies at the commercial end, a federal funding agency alongside, and two advisory networks whose job is to connect Swiss participants to European funding and business partners. The presence of Swissmem, an industry association whose membership is overwhelmingly non-quantum engineering firms, points at the audience the organisers want to reach beyond the specialists.

The programme themes and who in the room works on them

The organisers list six themes for the 2026 edition. The mapping below is our own reading of which co-organisers work in each area, not an organiser-published speaker allocation, but it explains why the consortium is composed the way it is.

Speakers for the 2026 edition had not been published in a final agenda at last verification. Past editions have drawn from the co-organising institutions themselves alongside external Swiss and international companies.

Where QIDiS sits inside Swiss Quantum Week

The 2026 edition is not a standalone date. It is one fixture inside Swiss Quantum Week, which runs from Monday 12 to Friday 16 October 2026 and links several Swiss quantum gatherings into one travel week.

Other fixtures inside the week were not disclosed by the organiser at research time. For anyone travelling from outside Switzerland, the practical consequence is that QIDiS in Zurich on the Tuesday and the GESDA Summit quantum stream in Geneva on the Wednesday and Thursday are bookable as one trip, with roughly three hours by train between the two cities.

Where QIDiS sits on the European quantum calendar

QIDiS is a national event with an international guest list rather than a pan-European one, which distinguishes it from most of the autumn quantum circuit. Its closest functional sibling is Quantum Infra Summit EU in Leuven, which also exists to connect researchers with industry and investors, but which frames itself around European infrastructure rather than around a single country's research base. Munich Quantum Software Forum covers the same broad DACH region and the same October to November stretch, but is narrower in subject, concentrating on the software layer rather than spanning hardware, sensing, instrumentation and communication. Against the EU Quantum Flagship's own annual conference, QIDiS is roughly an eighth of the size and one quarter of the length, and swaps policy governance for direct commercial matchmaking.

Who attends QIDiS

The audience is business to business and skews toward people who work on quantum technology rather than people evaluating whether to buy it. Typical profiles are academic group leaders and postdoctoral researchers from ETH Zurich, EPFL, the University of Basel and CSEM; product and engineering staff from Swiss quantum companies; technology scouts and R&D managers from larger Swiss industrial firms; and programme officers from Innosuisse, Euresearch and the Swiss Quantum Initiative. At the scale of around 140 people, the practical effect is that most attendees can meet most other attendees over the course of the day.

The venue: StageOne Event and Convention Hall

StageOne is an event and convention hall in Zurich Oerlikon, in the north of the city, used for conferences, corporate events and concerts. Its capacity is well above the roughly 140 attendees QIDiS expects, which in practice means the day is held in a configured section rather than the full hall. Oerlikon is on the Zurich S-Bahn network with direct connections from Zurich main station and from Zurich Airport, both within about fifteen minutes by train. Exact room allocation and on-site logistics were not disclosed by the organiser at research time.

First time at QIDiS? How to prepare

• Register as early as the form allows. At around 140 attendees for a single day, this event is capacity-limited rather than price-limited, and late registration is the main risk rather than a higher fee.
• Study the co-organiser list before you arrive. Nine institutions co-run the day and staff from all of them are in the room; knowing which one owns funding, which one owns instrumentation and which one owns European partnerships will save you an hour of asking.
• Book the whole week, not just the Tuesday. Swiss Quantum Week runs 12 to 16 October and the GESDA Summit quantum stream follows in Geneva on 14 and 15 October, so a single trip can cover both if you plan the train legs in advance.
• Come with a specific ask, not a general introduction. The format is keynotes plus panels plus structured networking, which rewards attendees who know exactly which two or three people they want to meet and why.
• Treat the networking blocks as the main programme. The stated purpose of the day is connecting research to industry, so the scheduled networking is where that happens rather than being filler between talks.
• Book Zurich accommodation near Oerlikon or the main station. Oerlikon is north of the centre and well served by S-Bahn, so either location works, but October is a busy conference month in Zurich.