Europe's contributions to ICT Standardisation globally Impacts from StandlCT.eu funding

Europeans must find ways to sustain European innovative businesses to seek ways to commercialize standards and bring them into new value chains. Standards allows us to go cross boundaries, to fuse together nature-based solutions, this is why innovation in the climate domain is critical to enable the creation of a genuine design of the ecosystem so profoundly important in today’s digital driven society. Global standardisation has traditionally thrived from open, bottom-up member contributions. Restrictions to fully open research and standardisation related to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR, U.S. Dept. of Commerce) have occurred within the last year, with IEEE issuing a ban (later repealed) on access to scientific publication peer-review. While IEEE was the first to issue such a ban, it is important to note that the relevant EAR clause also cited IETF, ISO, ITU, ETSI, 3GPP, TIA, and GSMA, illustrating the full extent of potential effects of imposing political restrictions to standardisation across the globe, straining already scare resources within the community and especially within industry fora. Recently in November 2019, the European Commission released the timely report on Industrial policy: recommendations to support and boost Europe’s leadership in six strategic business areas which looks into the future of the Digital Single Market (DSM) and which recognises the role of Standards: “norms and standards can help reduce uncertainties for industry and avoid fragmentation within the single market1 “. The strategic areas and future-oriented industrial sectors which are: connected, clean and autonomous vehicles; Hydrogen technologies and systems; Smart health; Industrial Internet of Things; Low-carbon industry; and Cybersecurity. This Impact report clearly demonstrates where the areas mentioned above have been prioritised by some of the funded ICT Standardisation applicants which were pushed forward to progressing in 2018 and 2019. Considering the above elements, this impact report could be seen as a reference document to high-level foresight groups working at the European Commission or within National Standards Associations or National member state offices working on ICT standardization to pinpoint the novel ICT areas which are maturing significantly to warrant further investigation as potential standardisation focal points so the project is able to be guided on shaping the right industrial and digital policies in the future.