On November 23, 2017, the sought-after prizes were presented amid great public interest by Minister for Education Sonja Hammerschmid, State Governor Peter Kaiser, board member of the Carinthian Economic Promotion Fund (KWF) Sandra Venus and Head of the Technology Team at the KWF Andreas Starzacher.

The awards were presented to developments which have led to new products, processes and services which are already in use on the market.

In the Micro-business category, Synaptos KG from Klagenfurt impressed the jury of seven with its project on ‘Smart Therapy – Digital medical reporting with the interactive health chart’.

In the SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprises category, victory went to THI Total Healthcare Innovation GmbH based in Feistritz in the Rosental valley which created another milestone in the field of innovative medical products with its ‘ViVi® infection prevention system’. The company from Italy settled here in 2009 with support from the Carinthian Business Promotion Agency with the aim of pursuing the development of medical products from Carinthia.  These efforts have now been recognised by the Innovation Prize. The jury also nominated THI GmbH for the ‘ECONOVIUS’ SME prize which will be presented in spring 2018 as part of the ‘Austrian Award for Innovation’ ceremony.

The large company Schwing GmbH based in St. Stefan in the Lavanttal valley won in the Large Companies category with its successfully marketed ‘360° swivel drive for Schwing concrete pumps’ project and has also been nominated for the ‘Austrian Award for Innovation’ by the jury along with Hirsch Maschinenbau GmbH and Lindner Recyclingtech GmbH – both also large companies. The company Lindner Recyclingtech GmbH, based in Spittal/Drau, was also proposed for the special ‘VERENA powered by Verbund’ Award.

The special prize for ‘Innovation culture – a long process of small steps’ was won by EWP Infra GmbH which was founded by six cooperation partners and is based in Wolfsberg. Based on their project ‘CG4CP - Competence Group for Clean Production’, they were able to impressively demonstrate that cooperation between companies brings valuable synergies and additional orders which would not be achievable by the partners alone.

Photocredit: (c) KWF | Johannes Puch