Social Impact Award

Social Impact Award (SIA) was founded in 2009 by Peter Vandor at the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at WU Vienna. It was set-up as competition to empower student social entrepreneurs in Austria - and by the means of the award finding out, whether there were any social entrepreneurs in the country (the idea of social entrepreneurship... was still pretty new). Funding was provided in a rather unorthodox way: Joachim Hunold, the long-time CEO of Air Berlin, had won a prestigious entrepreneurship prize by the Austrian chamber of commerce. After hearing a speech of the Institute's head Prof. Franke he spontaneously decided at the award ceremony to donate the money to the institute to "do something impactful with it for students". The investment of his prize money became seed funding of SIA. It was turned into prize money and event funding for three consecutive years, including the award for Social Impact Award's first winner, , a vocational school for orphan girls in Ethiopia. In the years to come, we learned that the Austria stereotype of students being unpolitical and unentrepreneurial could not have been further from the truth. Hundreds of students developed and ventures and submitted their ideas, including Whatchado, The Connection, Footprint,Soulbottles and the predecessor of the Romanian social retail chain Somaro. Together with Nicole Traxler, Matthias Hofer, and many others, we made sure to support these students with a new type of program. Rather than awarding projects that were already up and running, we started to work with young entrepreneurs in their first steps: by offering workshops on start-up topics, online voting systems, seed funds, and by giving each project individual feedback. Over the years the project started growing. ERSTE Foundation started supporting this growth and became our biggest, long-term supporter and Impact Hub Vienna open its doors in Vienna and brought in space and expertise. In 2012, Impact Hub Prague and became partners and brought Social Impact Award to the ...Read More