In 2021, the European Commission launched the latest Research Framework programme: Horizon Europe. Horizon Europe will run from 2021 to 2027 with a budget of 95.5 billion Euros targeting researchers and innovators in pursuit of Europe’s strategic goals, with a focus on the green and digital transition.
The first set of calls for proposals (for 2021-2022) were published in June of last year, with 846 different calls addressing areas such as civil security, digital industry, climate and energy, bioeconomy, health and innovative ecosystems.
Consortia of interested organizations including national standards bodies and CEN and CENELEC can submit proposals. If selected, the consortia will receive the relevant EU funding to run the project.
CEN and CENELEC have analysed these calls for their relevance to standardization. We have identified 125 calls (15% of those released so far) with references to standards, standardization – and even several that directly identify CEN and CENELEC as relevant organizations.
The information from the analysis of the calls has been shared with the CEN and CENELEC members through BT/WG STAIR and the relevant technical committees.
As testified by their Strategy 2030, the aim of CEN and CENELEC is to integrate standardization as widely as possible with the resulting research projects. For 14 of these calls, the subsequent projects must result in the development of new standards or directly liaise with CEN and CENELEC.
These Horizon Europe calls put CEN and CENELEC in a strong position to connect upcoming research with the European Standardization System. Our goal is to valorise as many research results as possible via standardization: CEN and CENELEC will put in place a range of activities to facilitate this.
These activities include supporting CEN and CENELEC members that are involved in project consortia, informing and supporting technical bodies about calls relevant to their scope, recognising future needs and opportunities from project calls and feeding project outcomes (including development of CWAs) into the CEN and CENELEC standardization work programme.
72 CEN and CENELEC technical committees have already been identified as relevant for some of these calls. The full dataset is available here.
For more information please contact Philip MAURER.
