Vulnerability Space: Vulnerability Meeting Industry in Austria

The meeting industry is related to the core of any organization, business, community, or workplace which helps them interact, coordinate, met and solve problems. Within the context of Europe, Austria is of utmost significance when it comes to being a cultural center of the continent that innately propels tourism potential. It further has good accessibility for having a central location in Europe that makes it suitable for having a massive infrastructure of the meeting industry that is quite visible both in Vienna and in other cities. In 2020, Vienna’s meeting industry contributes around 3% of the total Austria’s GDP with value around EUR 158 million (The Vienna Tourist Board, 2021). Capitalizing on these reasons, the meeting industry in Austria is considered in this research which is core and central to Austrian companies for their development and progress. However, recently, the meeting industry had to cope with the catastrophe of Covid-19 that caused it to lose 16.5 billion USD just in a year of the pandemic involving 2.75% of layoffs in the industry (Oxford Economics, 2018). Having seen that the industry had badly adapted to Covid-19, it is essential to take steps to help the industry cope with complex problems that it is going to face resiliently. Catering to this requirement, this work is being undertaken in which experts from science and practice are being brought together by facilitators where a collaboration between them, tapping on their respective expertise, would help achieve the target of ensuring the resiliency of the industry. This collaboration between the experts happens in transdisciplinarity process which is the fundament of this work. The transdiciplinarity (Td) is a mutual learning and knowledge integration process that happens when scientists and practitioners collaborate to identify threats and necessary interventions concerning the problem at hand and thereby present with socially robust orientations for the problem (Scholz & Steiner, 2015a). Transdisciplinarity is a beneficial tool to employ when it comes to tackling complex problems that often involve multiple dimensions and transcend disciplinary boundaries for being understood thoroughly. In this project of Transdiciplinarity journey to tackle the vulnerability of Austrian’s meeting industry, this whole process starts with guiding question: “How to mitigate risks and leverage opportunities of the meeting industry in Austria by 2030?” It is important to establish that both the risk and opportunity assessment of the meeting industry in the guiding question was considered to completely model the state of the industry that would help in 6 presenting robust orientations of the industry in the target set year 2030 for the study. The year of 2030 was set considering it as an adequate time for a transdisciplinary process to conclude and being suitably sufficient for practitioners to be interested in seeing the state of the industry by that year which is very significant considering several regulations and targets, especially of the Green Deal and the Paris Agreement.