Background: 

Terapet SA (www.terapet.ch), a MedTech company based in Geneva is developing and commercializing innovation solutions for dose verification in proton therapy. Terapet’s core product, Proton-PET, a novel detector that aims to improve the dose control in proton therapy for cancer treatment.

The success of one company is determined by both their effectiveness and the business development and growth strategies. However, the business is nothing if there is not an outstanding team to execute the ideas into action.  

Objectives: 

This master thesis is to first understand the different Human Resource Strategies by reviewing various literatures, and then using the theoretical framework to build up incentive plans that are suitable for the start-ups. By collecting data, we investigate the most suitable incentive plan in the case of young high-tech business. 

Methodology: 

A qualitative in-depth case study was conducted through the existing Terapet’s network. The authors have interviewed several stakeholders and both the current and future potential employees and carried out semi-structured interviews to understand the most suitable incentive plan for a start-up like Terapet.

Results: 

Empirical findings and analysis in this study were presented as answers to the research questions as listed in the following: 

• Why is incentive plan important for start-ups?
• What are the commonly used incentive plans for start-ups?

These questions are mainly answered by the literature review in the theoretical framework presented in Section 2.

• Is an ESOP incentive package more effective than a Bonus plan in motivating employees? 
• What is the preferred incentive package among employees in a start-up, based on the inputs from different stakeholders? 
• Shall the ESOP to be implemented to all the employees or only the selected ones?
• What are the detailed terms in the ESOP?

The empirical findings of these questions will be summarized in Section 4.

The final findings resulted that the board of Terapet SA decided to reserve xx% (confidential) of total company shares into the ESOP for the selected employees as well as the relevant directors and advisors based on performance evaluation and the need of the company future strategies.

Conclusions and outlooks: 

This master thesis contributes to the identification and in-depth study in one of the most essential components in the Human Resource Management, e.g., the incentive. This thesis provides an opportunity for the authors to gain a deep understanding of the Human Resource Management, what the incentive means for a company and for Terapet to identify the best incentive strategy and develop an implementation based on the feedback from all the involved stakeholders in the company. 

Based on the outcome from the literature reviews and thanks to the invaluable inputs from the interviewees conducted in this study, the authors have identified two main incentive plans for Terapet: 1) ESOP 2) Bonus Plan, as described in detail in Section 4. 

Although this study concentrated on drawing up the incentive plan based on the Terapet’s current HR structure, we have not considered or investigated on how the incentive plan could evolve when the company grows. When the company grows with more complex structure, different incentive plan shall be considered and introduced to suit the given situation.