MCI successful at Count Chotek Awards

The Tiroler Sparkasse bank awards MCI graduate Rebecca Wahler with the 2017 Special Award for Innovation and selects Parampreet Christopher Bindra as this year’s winner

Every two years, the Tiroler Sparkasse bank offers the Count Chotek Award to honor excellent papers with a business or economics focus. This year, the 2017 Special Award for Innovation was awarded to Rebecca Wahler, graduate of the MCI master’s degree program in Entrepreneurship & Tourism. In her master’s thesis “Applying eye tracking within the scope of sensory marketing for the purpose of evaluating the user friendliness of tourist websites” Wahler deals with the effective use of technological innovations in the tourism sector. The main focus of her work is on the so-called Generation Y, whose members are assumed to have particularly high expectations from websites and online elements due to their broad technological know-how. MCI Rector Andreas Altmann is delighted with the graduate’s achievement and states: “Miss Wahler has devoted her research project to a highly relevant topic to tourism marketing and produced a scientifically sound discussion of the results; now she is receiving due credit for her excellent work.” Hubert Siller, head of the MCI Department of Tourism adds: “Miss Wahler did not shun the challenges posed by eye tracking and mastered the application with ease. The results of her study speak for themselves, and provide an important foundation for future applications.”

The ten nominees, which were chosen from altogether 43 submissions, included the MCI graduates Lucas Huter (International Business & Law), Raimund Mayr (International Business), Sabine Maria Thaler (International Business & Law), and Julia Wäger (Entrepreneurship & Tourism).

The Count Chotek Award of the Tiroler Sparkasse bank is an important initiative to support junior scholars. This year, the prize was awarded to Parampreet Christopher Bindra of the University of Innsbruck: “As a well-established regional bank looking back on 190 years of history, we consider it our responsibility to strengthen Tyrol as a research location. Therefore, the Count Chotek Award aims to support promising young talents,” Dr. Hans Unterdorfer, CEO of the Tiroler Sparkasse bank, explains the purpose of the prize.

The prize is intended for the authors of excellent papers submitted at the University of Innsbruck, UMIT – The Health & Life Sciences University, or MCI and devoted to current topics and issues of business administration, economics, or social sciences. Criteria for the prize are practical relevance and scientific quality. With its prize money of €5,000, the award is one of the most lucrative awards for new graduates.

MCI congratulates the winners!

Press contact
Mag. (FH) Ulrike Fuchs
+43 512 2070-1527
ulrike.fuchs@mci.edu