Documented examples

Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.

Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 742 of 742 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.

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SearchCountryCapabilityStatusWith a mechanism6 of 742 deliveries

Coordination

1 delivery linked to University-industry collaboration.

Austriasince 2007still operatingbears on University-industry collaboration

COMET, Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies

Austria's COMET programme, run by the FFG for the federal ministries and co-funded by the Länder, had approved 81 competence centres and K-projects with eligible costs of 1,669.80 million euros by 30 March 2017, in which about 450 scientific partners and about 1,000 company partners cooperated, according to the Court of Audit.

81 centres and projects, comet centres and projects approved since programme start (21 k1 centres, 5 k2 centres, 55 k-projects), table 2, 2017-03-30. 1,000 company partners, company partners cooperating within comet (rounded), 2017. Rechnungshof Österreich (Austrian Court of Audit), Bericht 'Forschungsförderungsprogramm COMET: Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies', Reihe BUND 2018/38, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

Two federal ministries fund, through their research promotion agency, multi-year competence centres in which universities and firms run a joint research programme, with the Länder adding about half the federal share and companies paying roughly 40 to 60 percent of costs.

Preconditions

A federal research promotion agency able to run multi-year centre funding and evaluations
Regional governments willing to co-fund centres located in their territory
Firms willing to commit cash to a shared pre-competitive programme for up to eight years

Where else it has been used: COMET succeeded Austria's 1990s Kplus and Kind/Knet competence centre programmes, and sits in the same family as Sweden's competence centres (swe-kompetenscentrum) and Norway's SFI scheme.

Limits: The figures sit in an 86-page PDF: Table 2 on printed page 33 (PDF page 35) gives the 81 approved centres and projects and 1,669.80 million euros of eligible costs (federal funding 522.06 million, Länder 262.79 million), and the partner counts are on printed page 24 (PDF page 26), both rounded ('rd. 450' and 'rd. 1.000'). The counts are approvals since 2007, not centres running in a given year, and the partner figures count organisations once without saying over what period; the court notes elsewhere about 970 company participations including multiple participations, so 1,000 is not a count of distinct firms. Scientific partners include non-university research bodies, not only universities. The audit period ended in 2016 and the numbers are nine years old; the FFG programme page said on 2026-10-02 that the network currently comprises 23 COMET centres, 17 COMET modules and 15 COMET projects, with no reference date, which supports 'operating' but is not the metric. The court audits spending and compliance, not research output, and it criticised conflicts of interest in centre governance.

Learning

2 deliveries linked to Adult learning participation.

Austriasince 1994still operatingbears on Adult learning participation

AMS training measures (Schulungen) for jobseekers

Austria's Public Employment Service (AMS) had on average 76,496 people a day enrolled in its training measures in 2025, up 1.3 percent on 2024, against an annual average of 65,126 in 2015.

76,496 people in training (annual average), schulungsteilnehmer_innen gesamt, annual average stock, 2025. 65,126 people in training (annual average), same annual average ten years earlier (übersicht jahr 2015), 2015. Arbeitsmarktservice Österreich (AMS), 'Übersicht über den Arbeitsmarkt, Jahr 2025' (Spezialthema Jahreswerte), retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The public employment service buys and runs courses for registered jobseekers, from basic skills to vocational qualifications, and pays an allowance while they attend.

Preconditions

An unemployment insurance system that pays a training allowance
A purchasing budget and a market of adult education providers
Case workers who can assign jobseekers to courses

Where else it has been used: Most public employment services run this model; Austria keeps the training stock at about a fifth of everyone the AMS counts as unemployed or in training (76,496 of 394,036 in 2025, our division), a high share by European standards.

Limits: The agency reports on its own measures, in a five-page PDF (the training table is on page 3). The figure is an annual average stock, the number enrolled on an average day, not the number of different people trained in the year, which is several times larger and is not in this file. It counts only registered jobseekers placed in AMS-funded courses, so employed adults, apprentices and adults in schools or universities are outside it, and it moves with unemployment and with the AMS budget: in 2021 it reached 70,337 after a 23.2 percent rise during the pandemic job programme. The 2015 comparison is from the 2015 edition of the same report (https://www.ams.at/content/dam/dokumente/berichte/001_uebersicht_jahr2015.pdf). The trainees are excluded from the registered unemployment count, which gives the agency an incentive to place people on courses. The 1994 start is the year the AMS was established as a separate agency, not stated in this file.

Austriasince 1998dismantledbears on Adult learning participation

Bildungskarenz with Weiterbildungsgeld, and its abolition

Austria's Public Employment Service (AMS) paid Weiterbildungsgeld from 1998 to employees taking up to a year of educational leave, an average of about 14,000 recipients in 2021 at a cost that rose from 236 million euros in 2019 to 646 million in 2024, until the Nationalrat ended the benefit on 31 March 2025 in a budget consolidation law.

14,000 persons (annual average), average weiterbildungsgeld recipients on educational leave, 2021. 646 million EUR, total spending on bildungskarenz in its last full year before abolition, 2024. Rechnungshof Österreich (Austrian Court of Audit), report Bildungskarenz, Reihe Bund 2023/11, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The federal government let employees suspend their contract for training and had the AMS pay an unemployment-benefit-level allowance out of the unemployment insurance fund; parliament then cut the allowance outright when costs tripled and evaluations found weak employment effects.

Preconditions

An unemployment insurance fund large enough to carry a training benefit without a separate appropriation
Labour law that lets an employee suspend a contract by agreement and return to the job
Loose eligibility on course content, which drove both growth and the case for abolition

Where else it has been used: The successor scheme keeps the leave but caps the budget at 150 million euros a year, tightens eligibility and makes higher-earning employees' employers co-fund the allowance, which is the targeting the Court of Audit asked for in 2023.

Limits: The recipient count is an annual average of people on leave at once, not a share of adults who trained in a year, so it cannot be set against the indicator's unit. The Court of Audit found the training requirements so weak that the leave could fund low-value courses or plain time out of work, and that uptake skewed toward people already highly educated, so the programme's peak is partly a peak in subsidised leave rather than in learning. The 2024 spending figure is the parliament's summary of the government's justification, it includes social insurance contributions, and it is a cost, not a participation number. Abolition is not the end of state support for training leave: a successor Weiterbildungszeit with a Weiterbildungsbeihilfe capped at 150 million euros a year took effect in January 2026 with stricter eligibility (PK0907, 16 October 2025), so a reviewer could call this erosion rather than dismantling. The record documents that the benefit ended by decision; it does not show that adult learning participation in Austria fell as a result.

Experimentation

1 delivery linked to Firms through regulatory sandboxes.

Austriasince 2020still operatingbears on Firms through regulatory sandboxes

FMA Regulatory Sandbox

Austria's Financial Market Authority admitted eight FinTechs to its Regulatory Sandbox between its launch on 1 September 2020 and January 2023, five seeking authorisation as European crowdfunding service providers and three offering crypto-asset or securities services, and one participant had obtained a licence for a digital trading platform by the start of 2022.

8 firms, fintechs admitted to the regulatory sandbox since launch, 2023-01-02. 5 firms per year, participants per year the federal funding was designed for, in the 2019 impact assessment of the fmabg amendment, 2019. Finanzmarktaufsicht (FMA), press release 'FMA's Regulatory Sandbox presents positive results', 2 January 2023, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

Parliament amended the Financial Market Authority Act to create a sandbox at the FMA, with a federal grant for running it and an advisory board at the finance ministry that comments on each application's economic interest and readiness before the FMA decides.

Preconditions

A statutory basis and earmarked federal funding
An advisory board that can vet applications quickly
An EU rule change (here the Crowdfunding Regulation) that creates a cohort of firms needing supervised preparation

Limits: The count is the regulator's own and dates from January 2023; no later total was found, and an FMA notice on a later admission returned 403 to a script and was not read. Eight admissions in 28 months is below the five a year the federal contribution of EUR 500,000 a year was sized for (impact assessment, Vorblatt, https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/Dokumente/Begut/BEGUT_COO_2026_100_2_1632524/COO_2026_100_2_1632539.pdf, page 1), so the regime ran under its design volume. The sandbox grants no relief from regulatory requirements: the impact assessment says a core principle is that requirements are not lowered, so it is supervised testing with guidance rather than derogation. Five of the eight were crowdfunding platforms preparing for one EU regulation, which inflates the count with a one-off wave. Admission is not completion: the release names one licence obtained. The page was read through WebFetch because the FMA site returns 403 to curl.

Adaptability

1 delivery linked to Institutional responsiveness.

Austriasince 2020delivered and closedbears on Institutional responsiveness

COVID-19-Kurzarbeit, 2020 to 2021

Austria's social partners drafted a COVID-19 short-time work model on 13 and 14 March 2020, the AMS adopted its directive on 18 March and the ministers approved it on 19 March, three days after the first lockdown began, and in 2020 113,771 firms with 1.25 million employees used the scheme, against 508 firms in 2009.

1,250,000 employees, employees in firms using covid-19 short-time work in the year, 2020. 3 days, days from the start of the first lockdown (16 march 2020) to ministerial approval of the ams directive (19 march 2020), 2020-03-19. Rechnungshof Österreich, Bericht des Rechnungshofes: COVID-19-Kurzarbeit (Reihe Bund 2022/7), retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The government let the social partners (the chambers of commerce and labour and the trade unions) write the crisis model over a weekend, the employment service turned their outline into a directive within three days, and parliament adapted the existing short-time work law by initiative motion on 15 and 20 March.

Preconditions

A standing short-time work instrument and an employment service that already processed it
Social partners with the authority to agree terms for the whole economy in days
Fiscal room to pay out EUR 6.4 billion in a year

Where else it has been used: The same corporatist route as Germany's Kurzarbeit (deu-kurzarbeit), made faster and more generous; the audit office's verdict is the price of that speed: overpayment and repeated retroactive change.

Limits: The figures are in a PDF: the 113,771 firms and 1.25 million employees, the EUR 7.849 billion paid from March 2020 to March 2021 and the EUR 500 million overpayment are in the summary (PDF page 10, repeated in TZ 18); the timeline (social partner talks on 13 and 14 March, the punctation handed to the AMS on 15 March, the AMS board decision on 18 March, ministerial approval on 19 March, retroactive to 1 March) is in TZ 2 (PDF page 21). The three days are our arithmetic from those dates. The audit office is critical, not celebratory: it found that speed came at a cost, with an unsuitable flat-rate method and over-compensation of municipal tax causing overpayments of about EUR 500 million in phase 1, a directive amended twelve times by March 2021, often retroactively, the AMS and the ministry's labour market experts left out of the design, and no concept for targeted detection of abuse. The 1.25 million counts employees in participating firms over the year, not workers on short time at one moment. Austria already had a short-time work instrument, so the move was a redesign of an existing rule, not a new one, and the number of jobs it saved is an estimate the office treats cautiously.

Building

1 delivery linked to Large project delivery.

Austriasince 1998delivered and closedbears on Large project delivery

Koralmbahn Graz to Klagenfurt, opened seven years after its contracted completion date

Austria's federal rail infrastructure company ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG forecast the Koralmbahn's total cost at 6.139 billion euros at the end of 2023, 282.4 million euros or 5 percent above the 2012 baseline, but missed both the 2018 completion date in the 2004 Koralmbahn contract and the 2023 opening date in the 2012 to 2017 framework plan, according to the Court of Audit, and the line entered passenger service on 14 December 2025.

6.139 billion euros, forecast total cost of the koralmbahn project, 2023-12. 282.4 million euros (5 percent), cost increase against the 2012 baseline, including the later addition of the airport branch, 2023-12. Rechnungshof Österreich (Austrian Court of Audit), news release 'Rechnungshof veröffentlichte Bericht Projekt Koralmbahn', 4 April 2025, on report Bund 2025/14, retrieved 2026-10-02.

The move, and what it needed

The federal government funded a new high-speed line through the federal rail framework plan and its state-owned infrastructure company managed the build, holding total cost close to the 2012 estimate while a hard-rock tunnel lot overran in cost and time and pushed the opening back twice.

Preconditions

A rolling multi-year federal rail framework plan that funds the project year by year
A state infrastructure company with project controlling strong enough to absorb a lot overrun inside the total
A supreme audit institution that audits individual construction lots, not only totals

Limits: The cost figure is ÖBB-Infrastruktur's own forecast, which the court reports; it is a forecast at the end of 2023, not a final account, and the 5 percent increase is measured from 2012, when the project was already well advanced, so it says nothing about growth from the first estimates of the 1990s and 2000s, which the release does not give. The court's audit covered 2012 to 2023. The release says the tunnel lot KAT 2 alone rose 297.75 million euros and took about 31 months longer, with contractor claims above a third of the original contract sum, and that the company paid tunnel stoppages contrary to the contract. The opening date of 14 December 2025 is taken from ÖBB's own project page (https://www.unsereoebb.at/de/suedstrecke, 'Am 14. Dezember 2025 geht die Koralmbahn in den Fahrgastbetrieb'), not from the court. The full report PDF (https://www.rechnungshof.gv.at/rh/home/home/2025_14_Koralmbahn.pdf) was not opened; the figures come from the release. The started year is approximate and was not read at either source: preparatory works on the line began in the late 1990s and the Koralm tunnel drives later. ÖBB-Infrastruktur is a state-owned company, so the delivery is institutional, but the record reports cost and time only, not ridership.