In 2008, WU researcher and Wittgenstein Award winner Wolfgang Lutz was given the prestigious ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Investigator Grant for his research project "Forecasting societies' adaptive capacity to climate change." Lutz was the first German-speaking sociologist ever to be awarded this grant. Now the ERC has awarded Lutz additional funding, the Proof of Concept Grant. This was the only grant given to an Austrian researcher in this round.

The Proof of Concept Grant is worth € 150,000 and is available only to European researchers who have already been awarded an ERC grant. The grant is intended to help scholars market the results of their research work and to encourage innovation.

Predicting demographic developments based on education levels

The main goal of this ERC Proof of Concept Grant is to support Wolfgang Lutz in his efforts to develop generalized demographic methods capable of predicting trends based not only on age or gender, but also on factors like education levels and other attributes. "The method was developed for the first ERC grant," explains Lutz. "Now we want to apply it to marketing forecasts, using relevant attributes such as certain buying patterns and preferences, for example." Together with WU's Professor of Marketing Thomas Reutterer, Lutz and his team will be analyzing international data and discussing the applicability of the methods with selected companies.

Successful researcher

Demographer Wolfgang Lutz is one of the most successful sociologists in the German-speaking world. After receiving the Wittgenstein Award in 2012, he founded the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, the only institution of its kind. At the Centre, the Vienna Institute of Demography, the World Population Program (IIASA) and WU's Research Institute for Human Capital and Development work closely together on research in the fields of global demographics and education research. The goal of the Wittgenstein Centre is to become a world leader in the demographic analysis of the structures of human resources and their effects on society and the economy.

Click here for more information about the WU Research Institute for Human Capital and Development and the ERC Proof of Concept Grant.

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