The Living Standards Award is the most important Austrian award for standardization and innovation. Every year, the Living Standards Award shines the spotlight on national and international hidden champions. It shows how standards contribute to success in business, to advancing innovations and to turning ideas into export.
The 2023 edition took place on 15 May 2023, for the first time in cooperation with the 4GAMECHANGERS Festival in Vienna. Smart founders, organizations, researchers and start-ups that use standards to shape economic success and social progress were awarded in seven categories. The full list of awardees can be found here.
This year's winners show how standards can turn social value into business success. They set an accent for strong founders and show why standards should become a matter for the boardroom and where know-how from Austria is internationally successful. All winning projects were portrayed in short clips. Short videos presenting the winners can be found at this link.
According to the organizers, the trend of recent years towards more and more submissions from the areas of sustainability and digitalization continues impressively. For example the topic of "Ethics and AI" made positive headlines at the Living Standards Award. This is because WU Vienna received one award for a project that describes how to avoid the current threats posed by AI from other aspects.
After hybrid award ceremonies during the last years, the target for 2023 was clear: "We place the award and its people at the one place that stands for innovation, for the future and for sustainability like no other in this country, namely the 4GAMECHANGERS festival," Dr. Valerie Höllinger, CEO of Austrian Standards, said. Together with DDr. Anton Ofner, President of Austrian Standards, she was able to welcome around 200 guests on site and additional viewers in front of the screens in the live stream - including former award winners. "We launched the Living Standards Award 2015 to make the enormously accelerating success factor of standards visible. For several years now, a thematic trend towards ecology and digitalization has been clearly emerging in submissions. These are also precisely the areas that are playing an increasingly important role in EU-wide and global standardization," emphasizes Höllinger.
Standards not only guarantee the safety and quality of services, products and processes, they also create essential shortcuts into international markets for Austrian companies; there are countless examples of this. These include the high-tech companies BDI Bioenergy, TTTech Group or Viewpointsystem, successful start-ups such as Purency, BHS Technologies or Alpine Quantum Technology, the innovation laboratory GrünStattGrau or the repair and service center R.U.S.Z as well as the research institutions Austrian Institute of Technology, Montanuniversität Leoben or the Austrian Research Institute for Chemistry and Technology (OFI). They have all received the Living Standards Award from Austrian Standards in recent years.
The best success stories are presented every year at the Living Standards Award. Before this year's award winners were invited to the stage, Leonore Gewessler, Federal Minister for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Innovation, addressed the audience. She also emphasized the importance of standardization in the fight against the climate crisis.
The power of cooperation
Austrian Standards took the motto of this year's 4GAMECHANGERS festival (‘The Power of Cooperation’) as an opportunity to invite former Living Standards Award winners to the roundtable. On stage, they talked about their successes and the "power of cooperation" with Austrian Standards. This was followed by an extremely exciting keynote on "Inner Development Goals as a Standard for Transformation", given by Katharina Moser, Moderator & Director of the Inner Development Goals Summit, and Hannah Lux, Social Entrepreneur & Systemic Consultant.
"The Power of Cooperation" is not only the motto of the 4GAMECHANGERS Festival. It is the DNA of standardization - and has been for over 100 years. What makes standardization special is that it is open to everyone and everyone has the same voice - no matter if it is a large corporate, a young start-up, a research institution or an NGO. Our doors are always open for ideas on new standards. Everyone has one goal: to share knowledge, to move forward, to bundle different perspectives into one recommendation and to develop a common solution," says Valerie Höllinger.
