CEN and CENELEC and their Members are fully committed to strengthening their relationship with researchers and innovators and promoting standards as tools to channel research outcomes and innovative ideas into the market.
Standards are increasingly recognized as a crucial tool to get the most out of research results as they form a common language that allows researchers, people and industry to communicate, produce and commercialise products and services, as acknowledged by the “EU valorization policy”.
On the other hand, a common misconception that can often be heard is that standardization can block innovation. New CEN and CENELEC Guide 39 on the role of standards in technology transfers helps to counter this argument by highlighting how standards promote innovation in the marketplace. Recent real-life examples are given in the Guide.
While there is extensive information on the protection of Intellectual Property and related licensing in the context of technology transfer to support the uptake of research outcomes into market innovations, concrete information on the interplay between standards and patents is more difficult to find. Therefore, Guide 39 also gives attention to Intellectual Property Rights (patents and copyright) and their co-existence with standardization.
The main target audience of this Guide are researchers, providers of new technologies, entrepreneurs, and start-ups that are interested in making use of standardization to support a research outcome into a market innovation.
Anyone interested to know more on this subject is invited to contact his/her national CEN or CENELEC Member or the CEN-CENELEC Management Centre at Research@cencenelec.eu .
To know more about Guide 39, we developed a factsheet: you can read it here.
