European Union News - Research & Innovation

Since March 2008, the European Commission has been organizing a series of events with the aim of offering small and medium enterprises sollutions to tackle the crisis and showing entrepreneurs where they can seek advice and benefit from a wide range of easily accessible business support services. The last of these events will take place in February in The Hague (Netherlands).

The MOLTO ('Multilingual on-line translation') project, which has received over EUR 2.3 million under the 'Information and communication technologies' Theme of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to develop such reliable translation tool, aims to offer the european effective tools facilitating high-quality translation of texts between multiple languages is pivotal to this.

The European Commission marked the opening of the International Year of Biodiversity with a paper setting out future options for biodiversity policy. Despite past efforts, species extinctions are continuing at alarming rates, and a new vision is required to halt these losses. The EU’s goal of stopping animal and plant extinctions by 2010 has not been reached. Now more action is planned – for proper long-term protection of biodiversity by 2020.

The next February will be held at the Auditorium City of León the International Conference "Trust in the Information Society", an event in the Spanish Presidency of the EU that aims to influence the security and confidence in ICT in the digital age .

The European Commissioner designate for Research, Innovation and Science, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, pledged to move research, innovation and science 'to the heart of European policy' in her hearing at the European Parliament on 13 January.

How extreme weather impacts the EU transportation system is a question that weighs heavily on the minds of policymakers and the general public. Enter the EWENT ('Extreme weather impacts on European networks of transport') project which aims to identify and define these extreme weather phenomena and their effects.

On 14 January 2010, the European Economic and Social Committee and the European Commission's Seville-based Institute for Prospective Technological Studies will be holding a public hearing on the key aspects of the EU innovation policy and its concrete implementation in the region of Andalucía, Spain.

On 19 January, the INNO-Learning Platform of the PRO INNO Europe initiative is organising a panel discussion on 'Measuring the Impact of European Innovation Policy Cooperation Initiatives'.

The TEN-T EA is organising its second Project Management Workshop in Brussels on 12-13 January 2010. The event, which mirrors the first Project Management Workshop held in December 2008, will feature both a plenary session as well as smaller breakout thematic sessions, aimed at providing participants with more in-depth information on more specific topics.

The level of innovation in regions varies considerably across almost all EU countries. This is one of the main findings of the 2009 Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS), published by the JRC's Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), together with the Commission's Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry and the Maastricht University (MERIT).

Spain has pledged to drive forward the realisation of the European Research Area (ERA) during its six-month Presidency of the Council of the EU, which started on 1 January. Innovation and equality are at the heart of the Spanish Presidency programme.