Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

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Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020
versity and professors are central factors that make 
the funded structures sustainable. They also make 
the advertised professorships appealing to top re-
searchers.
The results show that good budgetary resources 
are important in order for the instrument to be effec-
tive. A lower funding volume or a smaller project size 
would be incapable of establishing structures, while 
significantly higher budgets would present the uni-
versities with greater challenges in terms of funding 
once the existing funding runs out. Significantly larg-
er funding volumes would also only make sense if 
structures larger than individual professorships were 
addressed.
The unique national and international formal (fi-
nancial) integration of (primarily) companies as 
co-funding partners of a publicly funded endowed 
professorship is a further success factor according to 
the evaluation, as the professors thereby become 
part of a network relevant to the universities and the 
funding parties from the very beginning, which en-
ables them to design and implement collaborative 
research projects. This would also ensure that im-
portant operational and strategic objectives can be 
achieved for the funding party.
The instrument is a relatively lean tool in terms of 
application (compared to the funding volume) and 
processing, but is very time-consuming due to the 
length of university appointment procedures. The 
time required for a professor to start work is relative-
ly long and the processes can only be controlled to a 
limited extent (it has so far taken between almost 
two years to nearly four and a half years from devel-
opment of the idea of implementing the instrument 
and the date that the appointed individual takes up 
the position). The main risk associated with this is 
that the co-funding partners may show a decreased 
willingness to get involved financially. In addition, 
the strategy and content-related interest of funding 
applicants and co-funding partners could change 
during this period and the integration of professors 
at the university and in the partner network could be 
put at risk as a result.
According to the evaluation, the greatest overall 
risk lies in appointing a person to a “BMVIT endowed 
professorship” who either does not provide the 
agreed services or turns out to be unsuitable for the 
purposes of the foundation and the interests of the 
co-funding partners for other reasons. However, 
these types of difficulties have so far been largely 
avoided or solved in the medium term in the “BMVIT 
endowed professorships” funded to date.