As part of the Business Case Challenge 2025, where university and high school students work on real-world business challenges from the industry, project partners Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna) and University of Innsbruck (UIBK) arranged VALPOP roundtable discussions on the importance of companies creating social impact.

VALPOP roundtable discussion. Image courtesy © Marcella Ruiz-Cruz

The roundtables brought together winning student teams and corporate representatives from the aviation, energy, and banking sectors in Austria. Conversations focused on the role of companies in contributing to social impact, touching upon public goods such as education, sustainability, inclusion, and health, and explored the opportunities and limitations businesses face in this domain.

The following shared themes emerged across the three roundtables and sectors:

• A strategic priority: Social impact is no longer a peripheral activity but is viewed as a core corporate responsibility and strategic priority. It supports the brand image, drives talent recruitment, and enables market access to new customer segments, with the investing principle of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) being a differentiator
• Business model integration: Students and industry representatives considered social impact most promising when integrated into the core business. Student proposals contributed to making business models more accessible and inclusive, empowering underserved customers, and implementing circular economy principles to achieve green transformation

The participants also discussed what makes or breaks a company’s ability to contribute meaningfully to public goods. Two major groups of factors stood out:

• Barriers: Regulatory inconsistencies (e.g., green finance complexity, carbon policies), administrative burdens (especially for SMEs and long-term ESG investments), and public resistance to change, often driven by misinformation or populist politics
• Enablers: Education and university partnerships, equip future professionals to drive change; youth-led consumer and voter pressure is a growing influence on company priorities; government regulation and technological innovation (e.g., electric mobility, digital finance) can accelerate change when aligned with market incentives

“The roundtables provided some valuable perspectives from business practice and ideas from students, which we can incorporate into our analysis of how political and legal frameworks influence whether companies create social impact, or not”, states Harald Puhr, Project Coordinator of VALPOP.

The Business Case Challenge is an annual event organised by WU Vienna and the funding initiative eXplore!. The aim is to promote sustainable innovation by connecting young entrepreneurs with established industries. The 2025 event, held from February to May, set a record with 98 participating teams tackling challenges presented by three companies: Austrian Airlines, the integrated energy and chemicals firm OMV, and the regional bank Raiffeisen Landesbank Niederösterreich-Wien. The VALPOP roundtables kicked off the award ceremony on 17 June, where the top six teams were honoured with prize money.

“The Business Case Challenge demonstrates that universities can indeed act as a bridge between research, companies, and politics in the work with social impact, and we will work on integrating similar discussion formats for the future Business Case Challenges”, concludes Harald Puhr.

Image: Two winning teams (one high school student team and one university student team) were chosen per challenge. Austrian Airlines, OMV, and Raiffeisen Landesbank Niederösterreich-Wien, posed the challenges.