EU Projects (Horizon 2020)
CLIC
WU’s Institute for Ecological Economics has been a partner in the three-year Horizon 2020 project “Circular Models Leveraging Investments in Cultural Heritage Adaptive Reuse (CLIC)” since December of 2017.
The CLIC project looks at the important challenge of reusing cultural heritage and landscapes and supports the EU agenda for the use of cultural heritage/landscape as a strategic resource for sustainable development by developing flexible, transparent, integrated, and integrative tools for dealing with the transformation of cultural landscapes. These tools are necessary to allow us to take full advantage of the potential of cultural heritage for Europe’s development.
The overall objective of the project is to identify and test innovative economic models for adaptive reuse of cultural heritage, exploiting and enhancing the multidimensional productivity of cultural heritage as a “commons” for sustainable growth in Europe. The circular economy approach opens up innovative solutions attentive to the long-term conservation of cultural/natural resources.
E-FIX
In the spring of 2018, the Institute for International Business will be starting a Horizon 2020 project aimed at increasing the application of alternative financial instruments in the renewable energy sector. The project will focus on the Eastern European and Caucasus regions, where there is great potential for developing the renewable energy sector but often a lack of available capital to realize these developments. The project aims to impart knowledge and best practice examples on financing options and on developing appropriate brokering strategies. The goal is to increase investments in renewable energy, thus improving the sustainability of energy production in these regions.
The team from WU’s Institute for International Business will be cooperating with 14 partners in this project. They hail from five different countries and represent the research, industry, public, and start-up sectors. Working together with the partners, training workshops will be developed and pilot projects, including financing, will be realized. The resulting findings will be documented and prepared for the target markets and transferred to the local communities. The Institute for International Business is in charge of the work package that deals with documentation and knowledge transfer.
Minland: Mineral resources in sustainable land-use planning
The Institute for Managing Sustainability started collaborating on the Horizon 2020 project “Minland” in December 2017.
The aim of the two-year project is to facilitate improved coordination of mineral resource policies and land planning on the EU and the individual member state levels and to integrate principles of sustainable development. Storage and transport of raw materials based on sustainability criteria should be included in land planning measures throughout Europe. This sector is particularly important from the perspective of Europe’s dependency on raw material imports, as well as in the context of the global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the European Commission’s 2018 Circular Economy Package.
The study will document administrative processes for geological surveying and the approval of extraction projects and other forms of land use in member states’ land planning policies. Further on, a case study focusing on actual extraction projects will analyze to what extent these policy areas are coordinated at policy-making and administrative levels: This will apply to both decision-making processes on land use in regional and local administration as well as to making and amending legislation on land planning and resource use policies.
The Institute for Sustainability Management is in charge of compiling a report on good practices in policy-making. Eight regional workshops based on these good practice guidelines are planned to support learning processes in administration, industry, and civil society in the EU member states.
EASITrain ITN
EASITrain is an EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN (Innovative Training Network). In this program, led by CERN, researchers will be working on developing the next generation of high-performance superconducting materials. Aside from research on and development of this new technology, the program will focus on educating and training 17 early-stage researchers from a variety of disciplines and countries. WU’s Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation plays an important role in this project: It is responsible for both designing an interdisciplinary training program for the early-stage researchers as well as for various activities focusing on uses for the newly developed technologies. For this purpose, the team will be conducting knowledge and technology transfer projects in cooperation with project partners, including AMS AG, CIS, Thermo Fisher, and CERN itself.
Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
The following projects were successfully approved in 2017after undergoing the rigorous FWF peer review process:
- Comparative Green HRM – The Example of Austria, Germany, the U.S., and the U.K. (DACH project)
Head: Michael Müller-Camen (Institute for Human Resource Management)
Organizations rely on the environmentally responsible behavior of their employees, because only with the help of their employees can organizations become truly green, sustainable organizations. Human resource management plays a key role in giving employees the knowledge and skills needed to make their behavior at work environmentally friendly. The objective of this project is to investigate:
1. Green HRM on different levels (from a provincial to an individual level) with a particular focus on individual and team Levels
2. Tensions that can arise from interactions between different levels in a green HRM context; investigating and documenting these tensions is intended to help overcome obstacles that present themselves when developing a green organization - A method for facilitating process innovation (Firnberg position)
Occupied by: Monika Malinova (Institute for Information Business)
This project focuses on process exploration as part of business process management. The main question this project strives to answer is: “Which is the best process exploration method for organizations?” - Split shifts: Fragmenting working life (Richter position)
Occupied by: Karin Sardadvar (Department of Socioeconomics)
The objective of this project is to conduct a comprehensive study on split shifts, investigating the topic on three levels: On the employee level, the company level, and the level of legal and political regulations. The main research questions are: How do employees experience and organize split shifts in their everyday lives? How do they coordinate paid work, unpaid work, and free time? Why and how do employers use split shift models? And how are split shifts regulated by the law and tripartite social partnership agreements?
OeNB Anniversary Fund
The following projects were accepted for funding in 2017 after being subjected to the international peer review process of the OeNB Oesterreichische Nationalbank:
- Coordinated political measures dealing with climate-induced socioeconomic risks
Head: Emanuele Campiglio (Institute for Ecological Economics) - Forecasting and modelling exchange rates in an integrated model framework
Head: Florian Huber (Institute for Macroeconomics) - Income differences, demand, business strategies: Product differentiation on the restaurant market
Head: Biliana Antonova Yontcheva (Institute for Economic Policy and Industrial Economics) - The Vienna real estate market, 1868–1990. Austria’s first long-term real estate price index
Head: Markus Lampe (Institute for Economic and Social History) - Cross-border use of health services: citizen and consumer-oriented approaches
Head: August Österle (Institute for Social Policy)
Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)
Pedro Guilherme Lindenberg Schoueri, DIBT student (Doctoral Program in International Business Taxation) and faculty member at the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law, was granted an ÖAW-DOC grant for his research project “Fundamental Conflicts of International Legal Frameworks in the Area of Harmful Tax Competition: the Modified Nexus Approach” in 2017.