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Eurescom's way ahead General Assembly discussed new approach to collaborative projects
This year’s annual General Assembly meeting took place on 14 May at the Eurescom premises in Heidelberg. One of the main items, besides approving the accounts for the fiscal year 2002, was paving the way for new businesses. A changed project landscape As part of the new business model, Eurescom has been diversifying its business and offers its projects and programme management services also to third parties. The future Eurescom project landscape will therefore consist of three parts clearly separated from each other:
Fast results through studies Studies are an efficient and effective tool to raise topics for discussion and perform initial strategic research on them. The reason is that they are focused, can be set-up at short notice and are short in duration. The results are available after only a few months. Studies have traditionally looked into new technologies and their potential applications in the wider area of telecommunications. The General Assembly suggested to enlarge their scope to also encompass techno-economic issues. In the techno-economic field collaborative studies can be successful means for lowering barriers for the take-up of existing and/or new services, and for providing decision support to choose the right technical solutions developed and brought to the market by manufacturers as examples of what they would like to see addressed. The GA also stressed the importance of an early forecast of disruptive events and technologies and the assessment of their impacts on telecommunication businesses. Collaborative projects in a changing environment Eurescom projects are increasingly competing with other collaborative programmes. Since the launch of the 6th Framework Programme of the European Union in November 2002, companies are targeting much of their human resources on the preparation of proposals for this programme. To avoid conflicts of interest and overlaps, the GA suggested to target Eurescom projects more on the systems view and on boundary issues where a collaboration within operators is deemed necessary to ensure a smooth end-to-end provision of services at quality standards that European operators are known for. Pro-active role towards FP6 Eurescom has taken a pro-active role towards the EU 6th Framework Programme since the very beginning. In the early phases of FP6 Eurescom concentrated on the role as a broker of ideas. This led to several submissions of Expressions of Interests. Following the first call for proposals Eurescom has acted as a locator of participants exploring the opportunities to partners that sought our assistance, and as facilitator of concrete initiatives. At submission stage Eurescom has been acting as co-ordinator of several proposals, IPs as well as STREPS and SSAs, and as consortium partner with particular responsibility for administrative management and dissemination activities. The General Assembly took note of the energetic approach that Eurescom and telcos in general have taken for the 1st Call. The situation at the end of the 5th Framework Programme, when only 10 percent of the resources went to the 12 most active telcos compared to 25 percent to 12 most active suppliers and 16 percent to academia, was not deemed acceptable by the GA, considering the importance of the operators in the industry sector. CELTIC – a new collaborative telecoms initiative To overcome the societal, economical and technical challenges and to allow Europe to keep its position in the competitive telecommunications industry, a new European initiative in support of R&D in telecommunications is being launched. Partners are industry, academia and public authorities. The initiative is called CELTIC (Co-operation for sustained European Leadership in Telecommunications). The General Assembly welcomed its launch and the support that telcos have given to it. The General Assembly asked Eurescom to continue its support to the initiative with the aim of having it accepted as a Eureka cluster project in October 2003. In this case, first projects could be launched in the beginning of 2004. Eurescom is providing the secretariat for CELTIC in its set-up phase. Further information on CELTIC can be found in this issue of Eurescom mess@ge under ‘European issues’. A new approach to collaborative projects In this changed project landscape with new programmes and funding possibilities, the General Assembly honoured the idea of jointly identifying the issues to be solved in a collaborative way. The target is to have a maximum efficiency while optimising the funding. The General Assembly expressed the view that Eurescom offers the best mechanism to achieve this target. Please send us your comments on this article. |
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