Abstract

Despite the Swiss watch industry has been challenged several times by US and Japanese companies during the last two centuries, it showed a strong resilience. Switzerland is still today the uncontested world’s largest watchmaking nation. This chapter explores the role played by few entrepreneurs that express a strong industrial leadership, that is, a leadership which went beyond the boundaries of their own firms and contributed to strengthen the competitiveness of the Swiss watch industry as a whole. Since the late nineteenth century, Ernest Francillon, Sydney de Coulon, Nicolas G. Hayek and Jean-Claude Biver have established successively themselves as the leaders of the Swiss watch industry.