Editorial

Dear ITEA Community,

After 25 years of ITEA we can look back with pride and conclude a lot has been achieved. And so it should be; my son is 25 years now and if I observe him I see that many things have been achieved in 25 years. Sometimes this is comparable with innovation - you experiment and try out things, accepting that some of the efforts will never lead to any return, in a tangible way. Lust for life and innovation are closer to each other than they seem.

During the last 25 years much has changed for ITEA as well, as it has for the rest of the world. Back in the 90s I remember internet connections still were a rarity at city offices, now calling themselves Smart cities. Or if you walked along the street using a mobile phone, the size of a brick, you’d get looks as if you were walking on water.

Just some examples of life changing innovations, disruptive and eventually part of our daily life. At ITEA, too, many ground-breaking innovations found their roots before moving to global markets. See the exciting examples that were developed during the early days of ITEA: Digital Cinema, which signified a radical change in the world of film distribution and displaying quality. And of course, a market breakthrough for our board member Barco. Or the great innovation that the project STARLIT delivered for cancer treatment, allowing the targeting and finetuning of radiation treatment doses against the tumour, and keeping the patient’s healthy tissue as unaffected as possible. An example of precision medicine, the buzzword in modern day healthcare.

ITEA’s current projects are still building the new blocks for solutions and issues that matter to the world. See how Safety and Security benefited from the PARFAIT framework developed for personal data protection in IoT applications within connected ecosystems. And read about the newly labelled Sustainability Call projects, whose innovations make industry more sustainable and greener.

Over the last 25 years software has become an enormous growth market and key pillar of our economies as well as interwoven with all sectors of our economy and society sectors. Professor Ina Schieferdecker (BMBF) explains how relevant this is for Germany. ITEA is a fruitful instrument to keep fostering the software innovation needed for the German economy, for example in the strong automotive sector, where complex and optimised supply chain and manufacturing 4.0 networks are key for its global position. Software is increasingly important, as Harald Schöning of Software AG explains. A company that goes back even to the early days of software, when it was not yet an asset, but merely an operating tool to be able to work with the mainframes of that era.

Software innovations with promise and projects with concrete impactful results were part of ITEA’s DNA when it started 25 years ago. But, moreover, something less tangible and magical has also been in the ITEA air since the early days. In the conversation between ITEA Chairwoman Zeynep Sarılar and former ITEA body members Karlheinz Topp and Luc Desimpelaere, we read how trust between the partners was of the essence, and how the fun of working together with people with the same passion and vision, created happiness, one of the key characteristics of the ITEA Family. That hasn’t changed, whether the project topic relates to a mainframe or a digital twin.

I invite you to discover the inspiring and personal stories in this magazine for yourself.

Jan Jonker