International Funding

Horizon 2020

LIVING INNOVATION – Co-creating the way we will live in 2030

Project head: André Martinuzzi

The Institute for Managing Sustainability has been coordinating the EU-funded research project LIVING INNOVATION (LIV_IN) since May 2018. The aim of the project is to investigate questions related to responsibility and sustainability in the field of innovation. It will develop new solutions and technologies that are both beneficial for society and successfully marketable. The main focus of the project is on smart homes and smart health.

Fourteen international partner organizations from industry, research, and civil society are involved in this three-year project, including highly innovative companies such as Siemens, Atos, Ericsson, and Infineon. By building a virtual expert community and a total of eighteen co-creation workshops across Europe, LIV_IN brings together industry representatives and citizens to shape a sustainable future together. Through its innovative approach, the project aims to help demonstrate the opportunities that responsible innovation creates for both business and society. In addition, new impulses will be generated for the further development of established methods such as design thinking, co-creation, and lead user innovation.

Public Procurement Excellence

Project head: Helga Pattart-Drexler

At the WU Executive Academy, an executive education project on public procurement was launched in cooperation with Bundesbeschaffung GmbH (BBG). The one-year project aims to improve and professionalize procurement processes in the EU.

A curriculum for a 6-week course focusing on modern public procurement was created for the project. Participants will also acquire more general skills, e.g. in the areas of negotiation, key indicators in business, and communication and presentation training. Courses are taught mainly by WU researchers and BBG practitioners.

Integrated Development 4.0 (iDev40)

Project head: Gerald Reiner

The ongoing digital transformation of the European industry will create enormous opportunities for business and society. Researchers and business leaders recognize the role of digital technology, which is shifting from supporting processes towards becoming the enabler of fundamental business innovation and disruption.

However, companies aiming to benefit from digitization will have to radically re-think not only how they can apply digital technology, but moreover on how they can increase their level of digital maturity to better integrate their processes – development and production – within a future digital value chain.

By closely interlinking development processes, logistics and production with Industry 4.0 technologies, iDev40 achieves a disruptive step towards speedup in time to market. By developing and implementing a digitalization strategy for the European electronic components and systems industry a “breakthrough change” will be initialized.

39 partners of six European countries are committed to achieve these challenging goals. They include market leaders in their domains such as AVL List, Infineon Technologies IT-Services, SMEs and research institutes and universities. WU will provide its expertise in Statistical Process Control, Production Management/Planning and Value chain Management/Planning for the factory of the future.

The project is supported by the EU-driven, public-private partnership “ECSEL Joint Undertaking” and co-financed by 30 ECSEL Participating States and the European Union.

Erasmus+

Knowledge Alliance BUILD

Project head: Christian Rammel

The ERASMUS+ project BUILD, coordinated by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), will start in January 2019 at the RCE Vienna / Institute for Ecological Economics. BUILD stands for “Building Urban Innovative Living Design Solutions” and will be implemented for three years under the ERASMUS+ Knowledge Alliance program.

The aim of the project is to develop and implement an educational program that gets school-age students, teachers, and researchers involved and provides them with the necessary entrepreneurial skills and networks to bring innovative solutions for sustainable and resilient cities to market. With a focus on applied biotechnology, students’ concepts of biology and ecology are transformed into urban design and innovative housing solutions, ultimately resulting in start-ups and university spin-offs.

Knowledge Alliance SDGs Labs

Project head: Christian Rammel

The European agricultural and food sector faces an uncertain future due to the multiple and profound consequences of global change. These include not only the increasing scarcity of crucial resources like water and fertile soil and the loss of biodiversity, but also extensive challenges due to rising population numbers and the effects of climate change. These developments not only pose critical risks for the agricultural and food sectors, but can also jeopardize the overall socio-economic development of the European Union.

In order to tackle these problems efficiently and effectively across the board, the European agricultural and food sector needs new sustainable, innovative products and services. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide promising impulses in this direction. Studies have shown that the agricultural and food sectors can contribute substantially to over a quarter of the 169 linked fields of action of the SDGs.

SDGs Labs, an Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance research project, aims to strengthen the implementation of SDGs in the agricultural and food sectors through the creation of knowledge alliances, new training and learning formats, and cross-sector cooperation, and to translate the SDGs into practical implications for these sectors. The implementation of the project will include SDGs Innovation Labs, SDGs Co-Learning Labs, an SDGs Training Academy Program for Start-up Incubators and University Facilities in Europe, and an SDGs Pioneer Academy Program.

National Funding

Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

The following projects were successfully approved in 2018 after undergoing the rigorous FWF peer review process:

• Urban experiments for a socio-ecological transformation (individual project)
  Project head: Ingolfur Blühdorn (Institute for Social Change and Sustainability)
• Late fertility in Europe (individual project)
  Project head: Eva Beaujouan (Wittgenstein Centre)
• An empirical analysis of environmental inequality in the EU (individual project)
  Project head: Klara Zwickl (Department of Socioeconomics)
• Material flows around the globe (MF-GLOBE) (individual project)
  Project head: Stefan Giljum (Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development)
• High-dimensional statistical learning: new methods for economic and sustainability policies (Young Independent Researcher Group)
  Coordination: Gregor Kastner (WU, Institute for Statistics and Mathematics)
  Partner: TU Vienna, Austrian Institute for Economic Research WIFO

OeNB Anniversery Fund

The following projects were accepted for funding in 2018 after being subjected to the international peer review process of the OeNB Oesterreichische Nationalbank:

• Asset prices and macro-modelling: joint analysis of economic policy and financial stability
  Project head: Katrin Rabitsch-Schilcher (Institute for International Economics and Development)
• Dynamic network models and dynamic systemic risk measures
  Project head: Birgit Rudloff (Institute for Statistics and Mathematics)
• Optimal momentum-based trading strategies with regime switching and partial information
  Project head: Rüdiger Frey (Institute for Statistics and Mathematics)
• Economic effects of multinational corporations’ tax avoidance strategies through DBA networks and treaty shopping
  Project head: Martin Zagler (Research Institute for International Taxation)
• Challenges in the field of value added tax in the digital economy
  Project head: Claus Staringer (Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law)