WKÖ-Startup Challenge is a great success for established companies and startups

“Collaboration with a startup offers small and medium-sized businesses and other companies the opportunity to increase their competitiveness, drive innovation and reduce risks. In order to accelerate the transformation process, the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber’s Austria-wide Startup Cooperation Challenge” says Marianna Konnell, Deputy Secretary General of WKÖ, înno up goes to the next stage of Runde.The înno startup challenge is implemented by WKÖ in cooperation with the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG.The aim is to promote cooperation between startups, SMEs and companies, to innovate together and work on the adventure to promote it in Austria.

For the third time, five challenges will be held in which entire companies or industries work together with startups to develop innovative solutions:

1. Salzburg Wohnbau has launched the first challenge, which requires a chat or FAQ bot solution for digital property management and a digital platform for tenders.
2. The Social Security Smart Card Challenge aims to use artificial intelligence to create models and graphs from health data. Comprehensive information should be extracted and processed in a visually appealing manner.
3. Österreich Werbung (ÖW) focuses on improving individual travel planning by using artificial intelligence to develop personalized travel recommendations and tailored route suggestions.
4. The WKÖ Federal Trade Branch is looking for solutions to monitor supply chains and promote a sustainable circular economy. The goal is to find innovative approaches to improve the transparency and efficiency of supply chains.
5. AUSSENWIRTSCHAFT AUSTRIA at WKÖ plans to expand its dashboard to present foreign trade statistics in a live way by integrating interactive visualizations and analytical functions to provide a comprehensive picture of foreign trade data.

Co-creation and collaboration are important

Collaboration between SMEs and startups has gained importance in recent years, as a new Bitkom white paper shows. Through this partnership, SMEs can catch up on the digitization gap and be more flexible in the innovation process despite the shortage of skilled workers and limited resources. Cooperation enables perfect integration and mutual benefit. Startups benefit from early feedback, sales support, and growth opportunities through existing SME networks. At the same time, small and medium-sized companies can take advantage of the agility, innovative strength and resources of startups to drive their own innovation. Collaboration with startups also reduces investment risks in research and development and accelerates access to new technologies such as artificial intelligence.