On 2nd February 2022, the European Commission has published a new Standardisation Strategy to ensure European leadership in global standards, boost investments in the green and digital economy, and prepare for challenges introduced by new technologies. To reach these goals, the strategy aims to shorten the European standardisation processes and improve the governance of the European standardisation system.
The Internal Market Commissioner, Mr. Thierry Breton, outlined 5 key strategic objectives that form the building blocks of the strategy, as follows:
- Europe must anticipate, prioritise and address standardisation needs in strategic areas and take a leading role as “standards-setter”.
- Improvement of the overall governance to fully represent the public interest and interests of SMEs, civil society and users and to facilitate access to standards.
- Enhancement of European leadership in global standards.
- Support of innovation through the development of a “Code of Practice” for researchers on standardisation to strengthen the link between standardisation and research/innovation through the European Research Area (ERA).
- Enable the next generation of standardisation experts to fulfill the need of new skills to continue the development of generational standards.
The proposed strategy also aims to leverage the European research, development and innovation projects more strongly for setting new standards. The Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, Digital Europe Programme and other European projects can be leveraged to identify what is needed for the development of new technologies and transferring the findings to new standards.
Another tool aimed at bridging EU standardisation policies and standardisation activities, specifically in the field of information and communication technologies, is the Rolling Plan for ICT Standardisation. This document allows for increased convergence of standardisation makers’ efforts towards achieving EU policy goals. This document is the result of an annual dialogue involving a wide-range of interested parties as represented by the European multi-stakeholder platform on ICT standardisation (MSP).
StandICT.eu 2023 is fully aligned with the overall scope of the newly released strategy, as demonstrated by the numerous activities performed.
The EUOS Standards Academy will play an important role as breeding ground for the next generation of ICT Standards experts and developers, to provide a free-access catalogued repository of educational material, mainly in areas of strategic EU’s interest.
At the same time, the continuous Open Call system managed to reflect the primary objective of supporting the European Standardisation community of ICT experts in bringing EU’s main interests, policy priorities, core principles and values, know-how and perspectives in the international landscape (most notably within SDOs Technical Committee, Study Groups, Working Groups or fora).