The Hasler Foundation (Stiftung Hasler-Werke, to use its original name) was established in 1948 by Gustav Hasler. The entrepreneur, who was childless, bequeathed to the Foundation the stock in his businesses, foremost among them Hasler AG and a whole series of other companies active in the field of communications technology.

The founder stipulated that this non-profit-making institution was to use the income from its shareholdings in order to promote communications technology, particularly in relation to research and training.

The Foundation went fully into its activities after the death of Gustav Hasler in 1953, one of its first projects being the acquisition of a transistor technology licence in the USA in 1955. As a result, this technology came to be studied at ETH (Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich, and was brought into industrial use in Switzerland at a very early stage. The Foundation operated its own research laboratory for electronic switching technology in Zurich for a number of years. Over a thirty-year period, it also published a scientific journal, which presented pioneering papers in fields such as data transmission via telephone lines (1965), colour television, quartz watches, fax systems, optical data communication, encryption algorithms and optical switching.

The Foundation was quick to recognise the growing need for training at all levels in the field of information technology and systematically promoted the development of the Swiss Software School.

The Foundation contributed significantly to the establishment in 1992 of the Institut Eurécom, a joint project of EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique, Lausanne) and France's former Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris, the joint institute being based at Sophia Antipolis between Cannes and Nice. The Foundation has contributed to the subsequent development of this project, which was the starting point for studies leading to the degree of Communication Systems Engineer, currently the most popular course offered by EPF Lausanne.

In the beginning, the Foundation obviously retained close personal ties with the company, even though, as a charitable institution, it was only a shareholder and played no role in management. With the creation of Ascom through the merger of Hasler Holding AG and Autophon AG in 1987, the Foundation still held the largest number of votes in Ascom Holding AG but it no longer owned a majority of the capital. The requirement for the chairman of the Board of the Foundation to be also the chairman of the board of directors of Ascom ceased in 1993. Since then, the links have become progressively looser. In the year 2000, the Foundation approved the abolition of the two differently weighted types of shares in Ascom Holding AG and, since then, it has become just one of a number of relatively large shareholders of the Ascom group. Over the years, the Foundation has diversified the investment of its assets so that it now has a variety of mutually independent sources of income to finance its tasks.

For the future, the Hasler Foundation intends to continue its commitment as a non-profit-making institution to progress in telecommunications and increasingly also in distributed IT systems. The latest example of this commitment is the competition organised by the Foundation inviting proposals for projects which could help to improve the reliability of communication systems.