Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

Internationalisation
Austrian Cooperative Research (ACR) enjoys a high 
profile on the international stage, thanks to the fact 
that staff at the institutes sit on international stan-
dardisation committees (see above) as well as being 
involved in numerous other European and interna-
tional umbrella organisations such as the Association 
of European Renewable Energy Research Centres 
(EUREC), the European Society for Automatic Alarm 
Systems (EUSAS) and the American Society for Ma-
terials (ASM). Overall, the Austrian Cooperative Re-
search (ACR) institutes played an active role in near-
ly 60 international associations and organisations in 
2018. In addition, the Austrian Cooperative Research 
(ACR) office represents the interests of Austrian 
SMEs and cooperative research at European level via 
its membership of the European Association of Re-
search and Technology Organisations (EARTO) and 
100 These include: Handler et al. (2019), Gruber et al. (2015).
101 See 
https://www.acr.ac.at/schwerpunkte/
its work on EARTO’s board. Over the years, this has 
enabled it to inject significant momentum into efforts 
to embed cooperative research into the European 
Research Area as well.
Austrian Cooperative Research (ACR) institutes 
generate nearly a fifth (19%) of their sales from ser-
vices outside Austria. In 2018, this figure comprised 
€9.3 million in orders from abroad and some €1.2 mil-
lion in return flows from international or EU projects 
(as part of H2020, CORNET, ERA-Net, etc.) involving 
a total of 220 international research partners. Since 
2011, Austrian Cooperative Research (ACR)’s interna-
tionalisation has also been promoted by the Federal 
Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology 
(BMVIT; now the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, 
Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Tech-
nology (BMK)) in the form of support for applications 
for EU projects, the international exchange of RDI 
staff and international dissemination, i.e. making an 
active contribution to international specialist events 
and conferences.