N°13
- December 2002
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N°13
- December 2002
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Méditerranée
Technologies - Les Docks Atrium 10.2 - 10, place de la Joliette - BP 62004
- 13567 Marseille cedex 2 |
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MEDITERRANEE TECHNOLOGIES AT THE LAUNCHING OF THE 6TH FP IN BRUSSELS From 11th
to 13th November 2002, Nicolas Chéhanne, co-ordinator of the IRC
MedIN assisted at the conferences for the launching of the 6th FP (sixth
framework programme for research and development in the European Union),
a large-scale event organized by the European Commission. The new FP will
cover the period from the end of 2002 to 2006. The three days were organized around the following main events:
Besides
conferences and workshops, this meeting was THE place to meet people,
to talk and to make contact with the partners of future European projects. Next step for the European Commission: the publication of the call for proposals planned for mid-December 2002. MT was particularly attentive to be present in the Forum and workshops aimed at the participation of SME and their role in the 6th FP. A detailed report on the place of SME in the 6th FP will be presented in the next Europe newsletter. Contact
:
In their
own country, they are the source of information on the community research
programmes, but in October, the 700 national contact points (NCP) were
themselves informed about the Sixth framework programme during specific
training meeting of the Commission. CORDIS Nouvelles questioned the SME of three European countries on the evolution of their role in the 6th FP and its effect on research in their country. Research institutes, Universities and companies in the Netherlands had an intensive participation in the previous framework programmes of the EU. More than 500 calls for proposals in the 6th FP involved Dutch partners and the national authorities would like the Netherlands to be represented in all collaboration projects. Although this is not really practical, this sentiment shows the country's ambition to have a primary role in European research. Eelco Denekamp, EU liaison officer for the Dutch ministry of foreign affairs and one of the country's ICP thinks that the 6th FP will be more competitive and more selective than the previous programmes and affirms that numerous researchers in the Netherlands will have to adapt to the new system. One of the principal objectives of Mr Denekamp is the strengthen the network of ICP with which he is in touch given the increased attention given to international collaboration in the 6th FP as well as the integration of candidate countries for the first time as full partners. "We have a national programme for supporting candidate countries and we will continue our objective to actively search for partners in the candidate countries to participate in the projects run by the Netherlands", he expalined. The 6th FP raised problems of a different sort for the smallest candidate country, Malta. The accent of the new programme is heavily on the critical mass and the quality of the research partners and the Maltese institutions must optimize the use of their limited resources so as to preserve the satisfactory progress made during the previous framework programmes. Ray Muscat, ICP and director of activities at Kordin affirmed that complete integration in the 6th FP is the only viable solution for a "micro-country" like Malta but he an initial resistance to the changes that are associated. "The structure of the 6th FP is simpler and put the emphasis on the SME (small and medium enterprises), which is an advantage for Maltese research", he commented. He thinks all the same that a major task is to regroup the research capacity within the country so as to reach the required level of expertise. Jesmond
Xuereb, ICP for the Maltese council for science and technology hopes that
the modifications due to the implication of Malta in the 6th FP will go
beyond the establishment of links between institutes. He said to CORDIS
nouvelles "I hope that our effective partnership in the 6th FP will
justify an increase in the national research spending in Malta. The results
of the 5th FP contributed to the support of this request but I hope that
the 6th FP will bring the message home". Moreover, it is not only SME that benefit from a participation in collaboration projects, added Mrs Sutcliffe " partnerships with SME gives a project a fundamentally different perspective. Small and dynamic companies function on the basis of "motors" quite different from major companies or research institutes". Certainly, each ICP will concentrate on the most pertinent aspects of the 6th FP during the training sessions in the light of the specificity of research in its own country. Despite their different approaches to the programme, the collective networking of the ICP of more than 30 countries during this meeting and the preparations of each one leads one to belive that the transformation between the 5th FP and the 6th FP will not just be limited to a change in name, far from it. Source CORDIS Contact
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