ERA ENV project exceeds expectations at halfway stage

The EU funded ERA ENV project, designed to encourage organisations from the new Member States and candidate countries to participate in the 'global change and ecosystems' priority of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), has exceeded expectations at the halfway stage, according...

The EU funded ERA ENV project, designed to encourage organisations from the new Member States and candidate countries to participate in the 'global change and ecosystems' priority of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), has exceeded expectations at the halfway stage, according to the project's coordinator.

ERA ENV (Integration of associated candidate countries and new EU Member States in the European Research Area by environmental approaches) was launched in April 2004, and will run for a total of 18 months. It is funded under the same FP6 thematic priority that it seeks to promote to research organisations and small businesses in Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Slovak Republic.

After just nine months of activity, the project has already sent out more than 10,000 mailings to their target audience, given ten presentations at international events, trained over 400 participants on FP6, validated some 400 project profiles in a newly created database, and directly assisted in the submission of 15 proposals in response to the fourth global change and ecosystems call.

'Apart from the figure for proposals submitted, these results were all better than we had expected,' the project's Romanian coordinator, Madalin Ionita from FIMAN Development Services, told CORDIS News. The reason for the lower than expected number of proposals submitted, Mr Ionita explained, is simply that there has only been one call under the global change and ecosystems priority since the project launched, whereas the partners had been expecting at least two. 'Our final objective for proposals submitted is 20, so now we are trying to focus on other calls under FP6 with an environmental angle, for example support to policies, Marie Curie actions et cetera. We will definitely have 20 by the end.'

Asked whether the consortium would also be looking at the acceptance rate of the proposals submitted as a measure of the success of the initiative, Mr Ionita replied: 'We cannot guarantee that the final proposals will be accepted - the Commission has to decide whether they are selected or not - for us, the success is having submitted the proposals.'

ERA ENV has had to deal with many of the same challenges faced by similar initiatives in the new Member States and candidate countries. 'In Romania, for example, there is a lack of information, awareness and experience in the framework programmes and its procedures,' explained Mr Ionita. 'So we've had to create awareness-raising materials and offer training to small companies and research organisations.' For this, the consortium benefited from the experience of its German and Austrian partners, who both have longstanding experience in supporting participation in EU research programmes.

Mr Ionita believes that there is a real willingness to cooperate in EU activities among small companies in the new Member States and candidate countries. 'But with no connections to the outside world, without understanding how things work in Brussels, they will never start to cooperate.' That is why it is so important that initiatives such as ERA ENV reach out to these organisations and establish such connections, he adds.

Given that the challenge of participating in the EU framework programmes can be particularly acute for small organisations from Central and Eastern Europe, CORDIS News asked Mr Ionita what the Commission could do under its current process of simplification to make it easier for them to take part. 'Well first, I know that in order to select proposals the Commission needs the relevant background information, but SMEs [small and medium sized enterprises] are in the business of making money, not filling out forms. They could try to reduce this stage while still gaining the important information,' he said.

Finally, Mr Ionita stressed that the time between submitting a proposal and receiving final authorisation to launch a project was far too long, 'especially in areas such as information technology', he concluded.

Countries

Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Türkiye