Our projects

It is common that some regions in Austria characterised by small political entities and sometimes geographical isolation find it difficult to keep up with the developments in technology and tourism. Instead of leading to authentic branding, the yearlong struggles to counteract this negative trend have often resulted in “indifferent” attempts to imitate other national and international examples and have contributed little to the rediscovery of regional strength and authenticity so far.

The aim of this project is to apply an entirely new approach to regional and municipal development and not to participate in an existing “regional development strategy”.

FRIDAR – Frugal innovations through authentic and regional resources

Changing environments and a consequential loss of regional authenticity present tough challenges to many parts of Styria that used to be successful industrial or agricultural regions. To combat this loss, it is important to know which resources are already available in a region. It is more promising to use these tangible and intangible resources in an innovative way than to follow short-term trends that do not take into account regional characteristics.

Corporate entrepreneurship is defined as the commitment of an existing corporate organisation to promote innovation by investing resources in the development of new business ventures, products, services or processes, and as the renewal of strategies and competitive postures.

The process of globalization has encouraged Multinational companies to spread their branches and offices all over the world. Globalization has inevitably kindled keen competition in the operations of all business. This competition has generated a need among all the enterprises, and especially SMEs, to adjust their strategies for their survival. Taking advantage of their size and strength, most multinational companies are developing critical sets of competitive intelligence tools based on technologies, commercial and marketing intelligence. SMEs, on the other hand, for their small size and lack of skills in technology development are in a disadvantaged position to compete with the large firms in the global arena.

The overall aim of the project is to strengthen young businesses (<5 years of age) in the Austrian and Hungarian border region through mentoring and coaching and to establish a cross-border economic community. This way, a long-term basis for cooperation in innovation and business can be established and active collaboration between Austrian and Hungarian young businesses and start-ups can be promoted.

There is great demand for tools that can help businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with their service pricing activities. The main aim of this project is thus to develop a model for e-service pricing and service price controlling as well as applicable tools that are tailored to the specific characteristics and requirements of SMEs.

For this purpose, existing concepts and tools from the fields represented in the project team are analysed and then used to develop criteria and partial solutions for new tools.

The innovation model BIG Picture^TM is a holistic, strategy-oriented and cyclical model. It makes the complex topic of innovation management with its strategy integration, the possible innovation classes from incremental to radical, the operational processes and decision steps virtually comprehensible at a glance.