Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

part of the EU’s “RiConfigure” (Reconfiguring Re-
search and Innovation Constellations)
85
research 
project. Social labs, which involve stakeholders from 
industry, research, public institutions and civil 
society, are geared towards the democratisation of 
innovation. For instance, the IHS is working to-
gether with the ÖBB Open Innovation Lab on a so-
cial lab for mobility. Amongst other things, it is 
lending its support in this regard to the “Community 
creates mobility” project, where an open mobility 
eco system made up of organisations from industry, 

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Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020
science, academia, civil society, the start-up com-
munity and many other committed mobility-minded 
thinkers has been created.
The Austrian Patent Office, which manages data 
on hundreds of thousands of intellectual property 
rights such as patents, registered designs and trade-
marks, has prepared these data in the spirit of an 
Open Data initiative and made it available to a wide 
audience. This is another major step towards imple-
menting measure 12 of the OI Strategy, anchoring 
Open Data and Open Access principles in research.
Universities and universities of applied sciences 
are also implementing corresponding projects with 
OI relevance within their field of activity. 
Although these examples merely provide a rough 
overview of ongoing OI initiatives,
86
they illustrate a 
pleasing willingness amongst all stakeholder types 
to take action. This can be seen across the board in 
terms of the content of the measures defined in the 
OI Strategy for Austria.
Implementing the Creative Industries Strategy 
for Austria
The 2016 Creative Industries Strategy for Austria 
has three main objectives: improving the competi-
tiveness of Austria’s creative industries; fully ex-
ploiting their transformative effect on other eco-
nomic sub-sectors, public administration and soci-
ety; and strengthening the innovation system 
through innovation driven by the creative industries. 
These objectives are being pursued through a total 
of 8 fields of activity, 22 measures and 43 imple-
mentation initiatives.
Established in 2018, the independent Creative In-
dustries Advisory Board evaluated the implementa-
tion of the Creative Industries Strategy to date in its 
first progress report
87
in 2019, concluding that two 
thirds of the measures have already been implement-
ed or are currently under way. In the second part of its 
report, the advisory board suggested injecting new 
86 A tabular overview of the current OI initiatives can be found in Annex I.
87 See 
https://www.bmdw.gv.at/Themen/Wirtschaftsstandort-Oesterreich/Kreativwirtschaft/Kreativwirtschaftsbeirat.html
momentum in areas such as impact orientation, fund-
ing and mentoring, in order to address relevant issues 
in Austria’s creative industries and guide them in a 
modern, sustainable and highly innovative direction.
Published in 2019, the Eighth Austrian Creative In-
dustries Report uses relevant data to highlight the 
sector’s increasing importance as a driver of growth 
and innovation: one in ten companies in Austria be-
long to the creative industries, which generate annu-
al sales of €22 billion – almost 4% of the country’s 
total economic output (nearly as much as tourism 
and just under twice as much as the automotive in-
dustry). A total of 153,000 people (both those em-
ployed by a company and freelancers) work at 42,300 
firms. Since 2008, both the sales generated by and 
the number of people employed in the creative in-
dustries have grown nearly twice as fast as in the 
economy as a whole. The Eighth Austrian Creative 
Industries Report focuses on the topic of internation-
alisation and illustrates how Austria’s creative indus-
tries are extremely successful here too, with 19% of 
their output exported and nearly 30,000 companies 
(seven in ten) involved in exports. 
Continuing the internationalisation theme, Austria 
also signed a cooperation agreement with Israel in 
2019 to work more closely together in the creative 
industries. The aim is to accelerate knowledge trans-
fer between the two countries and learn from best 
practice models in order to strengthen the crossover 
effects that the creative industries have on the econ-
omy as a whole. 
Internationalisation is also at the heart of the 
“Regional Creative Industries Alliance (RCIA)” Inter-
reg Europe project, which is being coordinated by 
the Austria Wirtschaftsservice (aws) and which in-
volves a consortium of nine European regions. It is 
geared towards increasing cooperation between 
creative SMEs and companies from other economic 
sectors by exchanging examples of good practice 
between regional strategy-focused stakeholders 

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