Strategies for European ICT Research: EU-Project SPICE Presents Recommendations
Vienna - The access to Asian growth markets is the main driver behind European ICT industry co-operation with researchers in China. This is one of the results of the EU funded SPICE project – a joint initiative of the Austrian RTD strategist eutema, the German China expert Skillnet and four Chinese partners. The project analyzed the potential for ICT research co-operation between China and the EU based on market data, the Chinese research environment, and interviews with European experts. “It is not so much the low labour costs that drives EU IT research to Asia, but access to product and service markets, but also to qualified personnel and the perspective to influence standards”, says Erich Prem, the project co-ordinator. From an economic perspective, future co-operation appears particularly promising in areas such as mobile communications, embedded systems, and RFID. The Chinese RFID market already is the world’s largest and the topic is also mentioned in the current Five-Year’s-Plan. Joint Sino-European challenges are also an important reason for future collaboration, for example in areas such as energy efficiency and medical informatics. In other promising areas such as IT security, it remains to be seen how far China is willing to open up for international co-operation in research and technology. The potential, however, in this field is also huge. Access to Chinese standards is particularly important for the European ICT industry. The EU should focus its co-operation in areas with the highest expected growth rates and facilitate practical collaboration, for example through best-practice collaboration contracts or process models. Further SPICE recommendations concern a European deficit in opening towards China. “Eliminating the current asymmetry in the relationship should be a major goal. Currently, the Chinese are well informed about Europe and the US – from funding to processes and institutions. In Europe, however, there are very few experts with experience in China. This has to change,” says Prem. The SPICE recommendations can be found at the project web site: www.ict-china.eu
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Länder
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom