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N. 16, Aug.-Sept. 2004
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 | Editorial
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The CORDIS Innovation Portal: a tool to facilitate the innovation process
Kurt König
Head of the Unit in charge of
CORDIS, Office for Official Publication of the European Union
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Kurt König has been in charge of the Community Research and Development Information Service (www.cordis.lu) since January 2000. Prior to this appointment, as Head of Unit "Promotion of innovation: training, research, take-up of technology, sub-contracting (DGXXIII)", he was in charge of the competitiveness of enterprises and namely Small and Medium-Size Enterprises (SMEs) under the 3rd multi-annual programme in favour of SMEs.
IPR-Helpdesk: Last July, CORDIS launched a new "European Innovation Portal". What are the aims and services offered to users through this new Section?
Kürt König: CORDIS is a service which has been provided on the Internet since 1994. The European Parliament and the Council have defined its aims as follows:
- to facilitate participation in European Community financed programmes,
- to encourage debate regarding research and innovation,
- to support the use of R&D results.
Due to the large amount of information available, it has gradually become difficult to find specific information, given that CORDIS is addressed as much to traditional R&D actors (regional, national and Community institutions, the academic world and industry) as to those more recently involved and who are relative novices (legal consultants). In addition, in pursuing the aims of the Lisbon and Barcelona EU Councils, it has become indispensable to develop support and tools to facilitate the innovation process in Europe. In order to respond to these two challenges, i.e. facilitate access to information and respond to the needs expressed by political decision-makers and users, it became necessary to reorganise this rich stock of information. In addition to regrouping all of the existing documentation on innovation at a single entry point, CORDIS has, through the "Innovation" Portal, created a new information search system for the articles on innovation. In addition to the "News", "Calls on Innovation" and "Events" sections:
- the "Innovation Policy in Europe" section provides information on the very latest developments and activities in innovation policy at community, national and regional level;
- the "Services for Enterprises" section offers a selection of services offered by the European Union to R&D actors on such diverse themes as technology transfer support, (Innovation Relay Centres), financial engineering (Gate2Growth), intellectual property (IPR-Helpdesk), support to start-ups (Business Innovation Centres)…;
- the section "Innovation in the Framework Programmes" provides information on innovation under the framework programmes and projects and offers tools such as a partner search, the pre-selection of calls for proposals…;
- the section "Articles on Innovation" enables users to search for articles from DG Enterprise publications using a multitude of criteria (subject, country, technology…);
- the "Library" section offers access to numerous documents, publications and magazines relating to the Community's innovation activities.
IPR-Helpdesk: How can the "Technology Market Place" service help R&D actors in Europe in the process of using their innovations?
Kurt König: Established over three years ago, the "Technology Marketplace" service aims to meet CORDIS's third objective, namely to support the exploitation of R&D results. It is a starting point for technology transfer, allowing R&D actors to inform others and be informed about exploitable results in a user-friendly manner. All of the results are therefore listed according to their potential fields of application and the existence of patents or any other types of protection is mentioned. There are more than 1,500 technology offers on the Marketplace and 350 of them provide concrete opportunities for obtaining licensing agreements.The CORDIS focus SME Supplement is intended to be an indispensable addition which is specifically aimed at SMEs.
IPR-Helpdesk: What will CORDIS's next course of action be?
Kurt König: CORDIS is an interactive and evolving service. Therefore, it listens to users and to any new ideas. In the framework of the "Innovation" portal, CORDIS wants to develop and strengthen its relations with other innovation-promoting services , as well as with the IPR-Helpdesk Project.
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