Why Standards for Research?
Engaging in Standards groups at the appropriate stages of research and innovation cycles is crucial to the development of new and evolved technologies. It is important to identify research topics for standardization at an early stage of all research projects in order to ensure that the requisite standards are available to the industry when they are needed to take the relevant new technologies to market.
Every ICT device, application or service implements standardized technologies, at many levels. Standards support interoperability across technologies. They help create global markets and enable networked development, where innovation occurs on top of existing technology platforms.
ICT standards embody a ‘state of the art’ of technology development. They are an essential resource for researchers in ICT. ICT markets are shaped by standards and if ICT research should lead to new products, new services, or whole new markets, then clearly research must result in standardization activities.
Benefits of Research in ETSI
Researchers benefit from interactions with ETSI's technical groups and gain early exposure and the feedback from the standards community that is essential to be considered before taking the results of research to full-market deployment. Research results need to influence standards in order to have a market impact.
Industry benefits from faster exploitation of relevant research results and feedback from a far wider community. Research input is highly relevant to the early study phases of product development when multiple alternative technical solutions have to be evaluated. Standards need innovative contributions from researchers to advance the state of the art.
ETSI Tools for Researchers
ETSI offers many tools to support the productive interaction between researchers and Industry, both in our standards committees and also during our public workshops and events. ETSI tools for researchers include:
8-point plan for Researchers
Standardization is a business process which is driven by industrial and commercial considerations. Reaching a collective agreement on a technology through consensus can take time, but is surprisingly fast when interests are aligned. The following 8-point plan provides researchers with a roadmap for bringing research results into Standards.
ETSI's Research Strategy
ETSI’s Strategy identifies clear actions to “Strengthen the linkage between R&D and standardization”. These include:
- Increasing the participation and contributions by (Horizon 2020 / Horizon Europe and other) research programmes / projects to ETSI Technical Committees (TCs) and Industry Specification Groups (ISGs) including 3GPP and oneM2M
- Influence the work programme of research programmes in order to facilitate exploitation of the final research results in ETSI standards activities
- Inform all ETSI members of new technological trends emerging from innovative research projects and seek to build bridges between such projects and ETSI activities
- Inform and educate both Academia and the global research community of the ongoing ETSI technical work, so it may be used as a basis for their research activities
Research, Innovation & Academia in ETSI
ETSI has over 900 members from Europe and beyond with more than 120 of them from the categories Research Public (43%), University (37%) and Research Private (20%). Universities, research bodies and SMEs have reduced ETSI membership fees designed to encourage participation to standards.
ETSI seeks to increase the value and visibility of our academic and research members through the use of dedicated events, webinars, educational materials, onboarding of research results into our technical groups and providing ETSI support / partnership in selected EU research projects.
We are looking for more ways to support our ETSI research and academic community and would like to get your feedback and ideas on where we can help.
Should you have any suggestions or questions simply contact research@etsi.org.