How Lower Austria overcomes challenges

Plans for the future: Maintaining the attractiveness of the business location and strengthening the competitiveness of the companies.

Lower Austria is the largest province in Austria in terms of area and has the most diverse assets. From state-of-the-art educational institutions to industry, agriculture, forestry, energy production and tourism – to name but a few. Since April 2017, Johanna Mikl-Leitner has been at the helm of Lower Austria as Governor. She sees a very challenging situation for the economy, but nevertheless looks to the future with confidence.

Is there a primary goal for the Lower Austrian economy that you would like to implement or achieve during your term of office?
Johanna Mikl-Leitner: Our economy is in a very challenging situation. Businesses, not only in Lower Austria but all over Europe, are struggling with the consequences of the Ukraine war, with high energy prices, with inflation and, in some cases, with supply chains. Our primary goal is therefore to maintain Lower Austria’s attractiveness as a business location and to strengthen the competitiveness of our companies. We achieve this on the one hand through innovation and on the other hand by intensifying cooperation between science and business.

How does the Province support this cooperation between business and science? What measures are there?
Mikl-Leitner: We already created the basis about 20 years ago with the Technopole programme. The concept for the success of our four Technopole locations is the close networking of business, science and education on site. Today, the Ecoplus Technopoles are internationally renowned locations for cutting-edge research. Technology transfer to small and medium-sized enterprises is at least as important. In Lower Austria, this takes place primarily within the framework of the Ecoplus Clusters, which are sector networks in the fields of innovative and sustainable construction, food, mechatronics and plastics. The focus of the Cluster’s work is on inter-company cooperation in which the companies research and develop together and learn with and from each other – the project’s findings are then implemented back at their respective companies. This concept has proven its worth especially in economically challenging times. When developments accelerate rapidly – such as with digitisation – or concept such as sustainability and circular economy gain in importance, it is often more promising to tackle these challenges in cooperation with other companies instead of going it alone.
Basically, Lower Austria as a business location has demonstrated a high level of innovative strength in recent years, and we also need this to meet the challenges of the future. Therefore, we as a province offer comprehensive support services. This is done, for example, with targeted economic development programmes that focus on research and technology development projects. In addition to our provincial funds, we also use large amounts of EU funds.

“Lower Austria’s economic strategy focusses on new, creative solutions and innovation,” said your website land-noe.at in 2020. What do these solutions look like?
Mikl-Leitner: New, creative solutions are offered, for example, by our spin-offs and startups, which we want to give the best framework conditions to grow in Lower Austria. I am thinking, for example, of Accent – our high-tech incubator, which supports start-ups from the idea to the founding of the company, or Tecnet, which supports Lower Austrian researchers and founders in the transfer of their research results into marketable products and services. One thing is clear to us: We must not rest on past strategies. The task now is to put ourselves in a great position for the future. Our goal is to become the most dynamic economic region in Europe by 2030. We want to develop an economic vision for each region in Lower Austria and provide it with very concrete measures. We are working on this with the business community.

In the past decades, Lower Austria has positioned itself as a thriving education location. Are there efforts to further expand the educational offers, e.g. with (private) universities and universities of applied sciences?
Mikl-Leitner: Of course, because we want to further expand Lower Austria as a top region in Europe and we can only succeed if we can attract the best minds to our location. The best possible conditions to study at the local universities of applied sciences are the basis for this. 110 additional such study places were recently approved in the STEM subjects for Lower Austrian universities of applied sciences. Science and research are needed for the major issues that concern us today, such as the energy transition, health and serious illnesses or the use of artificial intelligence. The new university places support our country on this path into the future.

How is tourism in Lower Austria doing after the last few years, in which hosts faced major challenges?
Mikl-Leitner: So far, this year has been very positive despite the inflation, but Lower Austria’s tourism experts have many plans still. From January to June, Lower Austria recorded around 3.3 million overnight stays. This means a healthy increase of 17 percent compared to the same period of the previous year. Compared to January to June 2019, Lower Austria is only five per cent below the pre-Covid levels. We are convinced that Lower Austria’s tourism professionals can also expect good demand in the coming months. We have decided to focus on our unique selling points such as cycling, wine and cultural tourism. We can offer our guests unforgettable experiences especially in these areas.

Due to climate change, winter tourism in particular will be in a bad shape in the future. Does Lower Austrian tourism, which does not have very high mountains and thus less snow, have to reposition itself? What ideas do you have in this regard?
Mikl-Leitner: For more than ten years, Lower Austria has been consistently following the path of developing our ski resorts into year-round mountain experience centres. The Wexl Arena in St. Corona am Wechsel is an internationally acclaimed example of how a ski resort can become a highly attractive tourist destination all year round through the specific development of offers. The Annaberg lifts have started summer operations in 2019, and this year the zipline and the family offer at Hennesteck have already attracted more than 10,000 guests. Last Christmas, due to the unusually high temperatures, both classic winter and summer offers were in operation in parallel for a short time. So, our ropeway and lift operators are already very creative and flexible, they adapt to the external conditions. For the mountain regions, it is important to use the opportunities of climate change for tourism. When it is very hot in the city, many people are looking for relaxation and coolness in the mountains.

The digitisation of our lives has been given an enormous boost by the pandemic, and the development continues to pick up speed. It is not easy for companies to keep up. What has Lower Austria done so far in this regard?
Mikl-Leitner: During the pandemic and also during the current energy crisis, we were often forced to adopt an event-driven economic policy. Events came thick and fast, decisions had to be made quickly. This resulted, for example, in the first digitisation subsidy of the Province with the Lower Austrian Economic Chamber to help businesses in lockdown, among other things. We hit the bull’s eye with this economic policy shot from the hip: Our economy is definitely on the rise in digitisation. We have now supported more than 1,500 of our companies’ projects with this funding since 2020.
We were able to react so quickly and in such a targeted manner because we already took the first measures in digitisation in 2015 to support companies in their digitisation plans, and since 2018 Lower Austrian Digitisation Strategy has been showing the way.
The lighthouse project of this strategy is the House of Digitisation, which was built by Ecoplus in Tulln and has been in full operation since the end of last year. It not only informs the population across all age groups with annually changing exhibitions, but it is also Lower Austria’s most comprehensive offer on the topic of digitisation under one roof – the House of Digitisation is the central contact point for companies and experts in the field of digitisation; all relevant facilities and institutions are represented there.

Sustainability and the circular economy are major topics for the future – how will companies deal with the so-called green transformation and what do you think is down the road?
Mikl-Leitner: In Lower Austria we are convinced that climate protection and economic growth are not mutually exclusive, but that sustainable and resource-conserving economic activity is an important basis for future economic growth and new, regional jobs.
Therefore, we want to make Lower Austria one of the leading Green Smart Regions in Europe in the long term: We support investments in sustainable projects, for example through our Eco Bonus, when companies renovate their old buildings. With our business agency Ecoplus, we are implementing a programme for ecological site development that supports municipalities in upgrading upgrading existing business areas to be climate-friendly; we are intensively dealing with brownfield recycling. And we want to make Lower Austria the centre of the circular economy in Austria. With great companies that are already successfully working on sunrise concepts, we have incredible potential here. We are driving the development of the green transformation with an Ecoplus platform for green transformation & bioeconomy founded in 2021.