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Graz, 5. Januar 2015

From Nowhere: Ten Years of Human Technology

A report on a newly discovered sector of industry, the emergence of a cluster, a level of active cooperation rarely observed, and a future perspective. Franz Zuckriegl gathered the pieces.

It is the year 2004. One year after Graz made a splash as Cultural Capital of Europe; the year when Austria’s neighbors Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, as well as Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Cyprus became members of the EU. It was the year of the great Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which claimed over 200,000 lives. The Austrian word of the year was ‘pension harmonization’, Heinz Fischer was inaugurated for his first term as president of Austria, Ernst Strasser resigned as Minister of the Interior and Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A lot and not much has changed in these last ten years.

© HTS/Das Kunztfoto

2004 was also the year of a Europeanwide boom in interest in the life science business. And in Styria — the region that had pioneered the cluster idea in Europe by launching the automotive cluster in 1995 — the makers of economic policy were considering whether, and how, they should sponsor emerging technologies.

Read more in the cover story of the anniversary issue of botenstoff: » botenstoff_10YearsHTS_EN

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