Think Beyond Summit 2026: Focus on Austria’s Clusters of Excellence

23.02.2026

The third Think Beyond Summit, hosted by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), focused on the power of collaboration and highlighted the research of the FWF Clusters of Excellence.

Representatives of over 1,000 Researchers from 18 Research sites met in Vienna to celebrate the progress of all nine Clusters: 

• MicroPlanet
• Circular Bioengineering
• Quantum Science Austria
• EurAsian Transformations
• Knowledge in Crisis
• MECS: Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage
• Neuronal circuits in health and disease
• MetAGE - Research for healthy aging 
• Bilateral AI

From the perspective of BilAI, it became clear that the Austrian Clusters of Excellence form a shared research ecosystem: universities, non-university research institutions, industry and society are increasingly interconnected through structured networks. This cooperation accelerates knowledge exchange, facilitates technology transfer and sustainably strengthens Austria’s science and innovation landscape.

Discussions focused in particular on how research results can be translated more rapidly into applications, innovation and societal impact. The summit highlighted that interdisciplinary collaboration — for example between AI, life sciences, sustainability research and the humanities — enables new research questions and extends existing methodologies.

For BilAI, the summit was above all an important networking forum: the exchange with the other clusters underlined that artificial intelligence acts as a cross-cutting enabling technology and methodologically advances research across many disciplines. At the same time, it became evident that a functioning innovation ecosystem requires not only scientific excellence but also long-term partnerships, shared funding structures and effective transfer mechanisms.

BilAI has a strong impact across disciplines

“Current AI is hitting a wall. Even GPT5 has not fully met the expectations of a broad, robust AI.
With Bilateral AI, we are opening the door to the future of AI — towards truly broad AI that can reason, adapt and generalize across domains.
The Think Beyond Summit was a very fruitful networking event. It was great to see the strong connections with other excellence clusters — from life sciences and sustainability to knowledge and European science initiatives.
AI is a key enabling technology. BilAI has a strong impact across disciplines — and in that sense, it contributes significantly to the research progress of all other clusters.”
Sepp Hochreiter, BilAI Head of Research & Cluster Coordinator

Additional Content:
Check out the Article of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) - in German
Check out the Youtube Video by the FWF : Austria’s Clusters of Excellence: Expedition into the Future