Spending time abroad is beneficial for everyone at WU. The opportunity to exchange expertise and ideas with colleagues at other universities gives students, faculty, researchers, and administrative staff fresh inspiration that they can apply to their work or studies at WU. Researchers Peter Vandor and Gerhard Speckbacher can even provide scientific proof for this phenomenon – they tested WU students’ entrepreneurial skills before and after an exchange semester abroad. Compared to a control group of students who remained in Vienna, the students who had gone on exchange had more innovative entrepreneurial ideas (Peter Vandor, Nikolaus Franke, 2016. See Paris and … found a business? The impact of cross-cultural experience on opportunity recognition capabilities. Journal of Business Venturing [JBV] 31 [4], 381–407).
This is why we try to give as many members of the WU community as possible the chance to visit an international partner university. Intensive consulting services, grants, and mobility funding for research abroad are some of the tools we use to achieve this.
We are also working hard to make WU even more attractive for incoming exchange students and visiting faculty. Because if our campus provides an international atmosphere and our students, faculty, and staff have the opportunity to work and study with international colleagues, then we can be sure we’re giving our students the education they need to act responsibly in a globalized future.