active in almost all European countries. After restructuring the company, Pümpin and his partners sold it in 1988. In the late 1980s Pümpin worked closely with Professor Michael Porter of Harvard University and supported him in his research on the "International Competitiveness of Nations." In this assignment, Pümpin was responsible for research into European business clusters. In 1990 Pümpin was appointed a consultant of the Swiss Federal Council, the Executive of the Swiss Confederation. Pümpin also supported other countries such as Andorra in developing their country’s strategy. In the late 1990s Pümpin was strongly involved in the building of Metro’s corporate venture company Invision. After a management buyout he became Vice Chairman and from 2002 till 2010 Chairman of Invision Holding AG, one of Switzerland’s leading private equity companies. Since the 1990s Pümpin has been a private investor in various companies. Scientific In his career as a professor Pümpin has published thirteen books and over 100 articles. His books were translated into more than 10 languages. One of his publications was The Practice of Strategic Management (1980), which was translated into several languages with a print run of more than 200,000. Management strategischer Erfolgspositionen - SEP (1982), published in English in 1987 under the title The Essence of Corporate Strategy is considered his most important work. Pümpin defined a Strategic Excellence Position (SEP) as a "...central competence of the corporation that enables it to achieve outstanding results." Thus the concept of "Strategic Excellence Position" strongly corresponds to the well-known term of “Core Competence” by Hamel and Prahalad, or the concept of "Core Capabilities" by Stalk et al., both published in the Harvard Business Review. Thus Pümpin became a forerunner of the concept of core competences that plays a central role in today’s strategic management. Pümpin's work enjoys international recognition. In the 1980s Ernst & Young decided to use the concept of “Strategic Excellence Positions” as a basis for their strategy consulting activities. For the development of this concept, Pümpin was honored with the Swiss Innovation Prize in 1983. Another important book that has found broad interest is Corporate Dynamism - How World Class Companies Became World Class, of which the German version was published in 1990 and was voted the best economic book by Euromarketing. In this work Pümpin further developed his strategy concept by promoting the issue of scalability as a means to develop strengths and profitability. In the