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RTD&D activities should help to prepare the policy making, industrial and related service sectors for the challenges of the new millennium and to generate a strategic vision of research in all sectors throughout Europe. They will focus on clearly identified needs and on improving the information available to policy makers about the implications of technological and organisational change and opportunities for, and the effectiveness of, policy measures.

The structure of the programme "competitive and sustainable growth" giving support to the systems approach comprises three elements:

(i) A set of four key actions oriented to solve clearly identified socio-economic problems by developing critical technologies or methodologies and clustering, when appropriate, small and large, research and demonstration projects of industrial, basic, policy-driven or applied nature around specific and strategic common challenges:

These actions will combine efforts in various research areas (e.g. materials, chemistry, physics, application of information technologies, clean technologies, human factors, socio-economic research, as well as training or accompanying measures) in order to achieve their objectives. The achievement of a critical mass will be essential to attain concrete and visible RTD results. This would necessitate, as appropriate, mobilising national and Community resources, in particular through calls for proposals targeted on RTD priorities and launched in these key actions to concentrate and better co-ordinate RTD efforts towards strategic European objectives, including pre-normative research in support of standardisation.

(ii) RTD on generic technologies helping to develop the scientific and technological base as well as qualified human capital in critical areas, and giving support to innovation across a range of applications:

(iii) Support for the more efficient utilisation of existing research infrastructures to provide an attractive networked environment in the fields covered by this programme.

Activities will be integrated and co-ordinated as necessary, within and between the different key and generic actions as well as with other programmes of FP5, with the JRC and with national programmes. This should provide mechanisms by which stakeholders including industry, public authorities and the research community can work jointly in response to common strategic problems.

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