Inspired by the backdrop of Stanford University, the Office of Science and Technology Austria together with ABA-Invest in Austria invited members of the Bay Area's entrepreneur scene to find out more about the Austrian Start-up and Innovation Scene, and its attractive incentive systems for R&D activities.
The event comes at a time in which Austria has been recently been placed by the World Economic Forum in the top tier category when it comes to overall global competitiveness, Austria coming in 21st out of 144 nations. In addition, recent statistical analysis by Eurostat has shown that Austria boasted the fourth highest share of organization and/or marketing innovations in Europe between 2010 and 2012. Moreover, the recent 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Index published by the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI Institute) has underlined Austria's "innovation-driven" entrepreneurial landscape.
These findings were mirrored by the speakers at the Palo Alto event (01/22/2015) such as Cisco's Thomas Werner from Enterprise Networks, who asserted that Vienna was, "one of the smartest cities for new technologies" in the world. In effect, Cisco has decided to curate several startups in Austria, which it has brought to the Bay Area to scale. The bustling start-up scene in Vienna furthermore has also garnered the attention of CERN, which has signed a cooperation with "accent," the high-tech incubator of Lower Austria that allows startups to access the worlds biggest research center, as Thomas Nennadal, COO of accent noted.
Additional speakers included representatives from accent, as well as a fellow of the Austrian Institute of Technology, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Austria, and the Director of North America for ABA-Invest in Austria. Photos of the event can be accessed here.
Text courtesy of the Office of Science and Technology Austria in Washington, D.C. - www.ostaustria.org