Foreword

To all ITEA Industrial Representatives and Public Authorities,

Innovation needs creativity and perseverance.

The challenges that confront us in our daily lives need innovative solutions. Sustainability, time-to-market and limited resources of the planet are only few of these challenges and all are applicable for each company, each organisation and each country

These are problems of TODAY and they need to have impactful solutions NOW

ITEA has been the fast track to software innovation for 25 years already, characterised by its bottom-up approach and agility. In software innovation, the rapidly changing environment demands flexibility and adaptability. In this way, ITEA is a unique innovation instrument in sensing the concepts of tomorrow and creating solutions based on the urgent needs of end users and society. Just to mention an example: virtualisation in industry, which started in an ITEA project as a creative idea, has now led to the Digital Twin concept. And ITEA’s history is full of many other impactful results.

In these challenging days, we need innovation that can be applied as quickly as possible to the lives of people, so research projects need fast exploitation as well as the discovery of new concepts. ITEA projects have resulted in spin-off companies, global standardisation and fast exploitation in many markets.

Since 1998, ITEA has been fostering software innovation as an impactful and economic instrument. This report contains a number of examples of the impact that has been achieved since the beginning of ITEA and what can be expected in the near future for software innovation.

ITEA is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and we would like to thank you for your continuous support and valuable input, enabling the ITEA Community to perform successfully over these past 25 years. With the continuous interest, commitment and creative ideas of the ITEA Community and with the trust and support of Public Authorities and Bodies, ITEA has become the fast track to software innovation.

Happy Anniversary

Zeynep Sarılar, ITEA Chairwoman