Competitiveness Council endorses Commission's approach to CIP
The Competitiveness Council backed the Commission's proposed approach for establishing a competitiveness and innovation framework programme (CIP), after reviewing a progress report on 29 November. The Commission plans to consolidate several existing programmes and some new initiatives into a single CIP framework based on three pillars: entrepreneurship and innovation, information and communication technology policy support, and intelligent energy Europe. The Commission has proposed a programme budget of 4.2 billion euro for the period of 2007 to 2013, which will depend upon the final decision on the EU budget for the same period. The progress report presented to the Council outlines the complementarities between the CIP on the one hand and the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and the Structural Funds on the other. It also describes the instruments within the CIP and clarifies the role of eco-innovation, as well as setting out principles for the management and evaluation of the programme. The Council has instructed its Committee of Permanent Representatives to use the report as the basis for future discussions. During the same meeting, the Competitiveness Council was joined by the council of the European Space Agency (ESA) for the third 'Space Council'. The main item of business was the global monitoring for environment and security (GMES) initiative, designed to provide policy makers with global satellite monitoring data on environmental and security issues. The Space Council reaffirmed the fact that GMES should be user-driven and service oriented, with services being delivered in the most efficient way, where possible by the private sector. It also stressed the international dimension of the programme as Europe's main contribution to global Earth observation system of systems (GEOSS) and highlighted the need to develop international partnerships. While the Space Council acknowledged the Commission's intention to allocate a substantial amount of FP7 funding for GMES services and components, it also asked the Council and the European Parliament to explore other possible funding sources within the Community budget. Finally, in terms of the implementation of the programme, the Space Council called for the development of a comprehensive programme plan addressing the overall GMES architecture, and a policy for accessing the information produced by GMES. 'This should be prepared as soon as possible in order to be available after the EU Member States have reached agreement on the financial perspectives.