The 6th ITEA Symposium

During the symposium different awards have been distributed under which the “ERA achievement award” for outstanding contributions to turning the European Research and Innovation Area into reality as an open federation of European trans-national, national and regional efforts in support of advancing European competitiveness. Mr. Jan van den Biesen received this award because he was instrumental in making a big step forward to bringing EUREKA and the Framework Programme closer together with the ‘umbrella concept’ in the structure of European Technology Platforms.

Furthermore the “TT-Medal” project has been elected as winner of the ITEA 2005 Achievement Award, the project has achieved a major breakthrough by developing a generic standardised solution for software system testing, which offers a considerable improvement of time to market and in the same time an increase of the quality of the products by using new way to test embedded systems. Besides the award winning project many other interesting projects have been presented like the project FAMILIES which focuses upon the value of maturity, institutionalisation, business relevance, standardisation and dissemination. This project has been carried out by a consortium of leading European companies, research and technology transfer institutions and universities.

The next step for ITEA is now ITEA 2, which according to outgoing chairman Paul Mehring is “more than a change in name”. Indeed, ITEA 2 aims to mobilise 20, 000 person-years of research with an investment of 3 billion euros (more than the double in comparison with ITEA), extending its scope to include services and downstream activities on the basis of research, development and demonstration.