The COMET program promotes the development and expansion of research centers and competence centers for excellent technologies, as well as the networking of economy and science in Vienna. The competence centers programs, initiated in 1998, are one of the most successful innovations of technology policy in Austria. About 1,500 researchers from academia and industry work on jointly defined research programs at an internationally competitive level in over 40 centers running these programs.
The latest call is to promote research programmes jointly supported by at least one science partner and five business partners. The programmes will be supported with up to EUR 2.55 million per year over the course of eight years. The call for tenders is directed at existing competence centres or competence projects, as well as new consortia to the cooperation between science and business and will take place in competition proceedings.
The object of the competence centers is to bring together basic scientific research and economic skills with specific research needs and thus realize joint projects on an internationally competitive level based on cooperation. The City of Vienna and the Vienna Business Agency support about 18 centers with Viennese participation of around 4 million Euros annually since 2008.