Vienna offers things that other cities dream of

Wirtschaftsagentur Wien

Redaktion

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The Vienna Business Agency makes Austria’s capital a great location for international start-ups and established companies.

Despite the Covid pandemic, Vienna is booming as a location for start-ups and international companies. In 2022, 237 international companies settled in the capital. Gerhard Hirczi has been managing director of the Vienna Business Agency since 2009, having launched the ViennaUP start-up festival three years ago.

ViennaUP was created under the management of Gerhard Hirczi.
© Wirtschaftsagentur Wien / Karin Hackl

This year the ViennaUP start-up festival was held for the third time. Please explain the idea behind it and how ViennaUP works.
Gerhard Hirczi: ViennaUP is an international location and innovation festival that we created. We are a kind of founding father and curator at the same time, because we organise the festival with about 35 national and international partners. Therefore, there is a multitude of organisers that are held together by us. In this way we pursue two ideas: On the one hand, we want to position Vienna internationally as a location for innovation. On the other hand, we offer our local start-ups an international stage to present themselves and bring them together with investors, other start-ups, researchers, talent in general and companies.

You support local start-ups, but you also want to encourage international, established companies to settle in Vienna.
Hirczi: One of our goals is to attract international businesses. We are the City of Vienna’s office for bringing as many attractive international companies as possible to Vienna and thus strengthening the business location.

you pay more attention to start-ups these days than to already established international companies?
Hirczi: We make no distinction. We know that you have to actively get into the start-up scene, because it has become an important element of every economic policy and every economy in the past ten years. It has become indispensable to look after and address this target group. The same applies, of course, to traditional businesses. It would be a gross mistake to back only one of the two horses. We have a sales force that is on the road 24/7 and secures deals. There is no difference whether you are talking to a start-up or a large IT company in New York or São Paolo.

Is there any special emphasis on sectors that you would like to bring to Vienna in particular?
Hirczi: Our philosophy is to emphasise our strengths. We are targeting companies that we know are already going to find a well-established ecosystem in Vienna. In Vienna’s economic strategy, the emphasis is on life sciences, IT and digitisation. Vienna is considered a tourism metropolis. But if you look at the value added and the turnover, Vienna is four times more of an IT metropolis and three times more of a life sciences metropolis. We are working on imprinting this in the minds of decision-makers.

Everywhere people complain about the lack of IT specialists, including in Vienna. Has Vienna missed out on a development here?
Hirczi: We are lucky that other regions are not doing any better in IT. Whether in Silicon Valley, on the East Coast of the United States, in Germany or in Bulgaria – companies everywhere are desperately looking for IT specialists. This suggests that we in Austria have not missed out on anything. But we haven’t done anything better than the others, otherwise we wouldn’t have this problem. This is a global challenge.

The ViennaUP Homebase at Karlsplatz in Vienna – the start-up festival took place for the third time in 2023.
© Wirtschaftsagentur Wien / Philipp Lipiarski

How is Vienna doing in the international competition for IT staff?
Hirczi: Vienna has some advantages over other cities. We have a large catchment area with Central and Eastern Europe, and many workers from Eastern Europe like to come to Vienna to work and live here. This is also related to the quality of life. If you think about where you want to live in the years to come, the quality of life counts enormously. The assets that Vienna has to offer can be used as a USP compared to other cities and regions. If you compare Vienna with other metropolises, the city is extremely lively and not unpleasantly overcrowded, which is already the case with some of our major competitors. Amsterdam, London or Paris are already being abandoned by young people and young companies because people can no longer afford to live and work in the city centre.

Has it become more difficult to attract companies to Vienna due to the crises of the recent past?
Hirczi: No, it hasn’t become more difficult at all, as the figures for international business relocations show. Business has not collapsed.

The best reasons to settle in Vienna are…
Hirczi: …an excellent package of a well-functioning infrastructure, a highly developed innovation and research landscape and a population with high purchasing power. Above all, quick access to many decision-makers is particularly important as this makes it easier for companies to carry out their business.