Dufour Selected as a Winner of IMD Startup Competition

Dufour Aerospace announced on Monday that is has been selected by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) as one of the winners of their 22nd annual Startup Competition.

The startup competition hosts a team of IMD faculty with extensive experience in entrepreneurial activities will select the winning startups, with advisory support from the Swiss government Innosuisse, VentureKick, MassChallenge Switzerland and investiere.

The hosts create a ‘short list’ of candidates within 2 weeks of the close of the registration, and then steadily work to narrow down the list. Winners are officially selected in early December and expect a formal commitment by the selected ventures shortly afterwards.

Dufour stated on a short press release from their website: “We look forward to learning from the IMD’s expertise in international management, which will complement the technical leadership of our partners at ETH Zurich and ZHAW Center for Aviation in aircraft control and design.”

Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Singapore, IMD has been ranked in the top five for executive education worldwide for 15 years and in the top three for the last eight years by The Financial Times.

Dufour Aerospace is a young start-up on a mission to revolutionize vertical mobility by developing electric and hybrid-electric tilt-wing VTOL aircraft.

Why it’s important: IMD’s selection of Dufour Aerospace is an opportunity for the executive team at Dufour to continue to grow professionally and further advance the progress of talent development and technology maturation in relation to both existing electric aviation solutions to general aviation and future solutions to aerial mobility over the next 10 to 15 years. A number of successful startups have previously been selected by IMD in their startup competition, including AC Immune, Biowatch, Doodle, ecoRobotix, G-Therapeutics, Softwing, SpiroChem, Sysmosoft, Uepaa, VisioWave, and VWavecall.