General Information EUREKA and EUROAGRI

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Website: www.eureka.be

A quarterly magazine, Eureka News, is available on request.

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EUREKA

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EUREKA is a pan-European network for market-oriented, industrial R&D. Member countries are Austria . Belgium . Croatia . Cyprus . Czech Republic . Denmark . Estonia . European Union . Finland . France . Germany . Greece . Hungary . Iceland . Ireland . Israel . Italy . Latvia . Lithuania . Luxembourg . Malta . Monaco . The Netherlands . Norway . Poland . Portugal . Romania . Russia . San Marino . Serbia & Montenegro . Slovakia . Slovenia . Spain . Sweden . Switzerland . Turkey . Ukraine . United Kingdom

The EUREKA initiative was launched in 1985 with the intention of promoting the competitiveness of the European industry in the world markets through scientific and technological co-operation.

Through a flexible and decentralised Network, EUREKA offers project partners rapid access to a wealth of knowledge, skills and expertise across Europe and facilitates access to national public and private funding schemes. Within a EUREKA project, partners develop new technologies for which they agree the Intellectual Property Rights and build partnerships to penetrate new markets.

EUREKA is committed to enhancing the competitiveness of European industry through the promotion of crossborder, market-oriented innovation. This pan-European inter-governmental initiative enables industry and research institutes from 37 member countries and the European Union (EU) to collaborate in a bottom-up approach to developing and exploiting innovative technologies. Over 24 billion euro of public and private funding has been mobilised to support research and development (R&D) carried out within the EUREKA framework. On-going projects are attracting investment of some 4 billion euro. Together with other actors in the European Research Area (ERA), such as COST and the EU Framework Programme, EUREKA is working towards the Barcelona goal of increasing investment in R&D to 3% of national GDP by 2010.

These activities may be grouped as Clusters or Umbrellas.

EUREKA Clusters are longer-term, strategically significant industrial initiatives. They usually have a large number of participants, and aim to develop generic technologies of key importance for European competitiveness, primarily in ICT and, more recently, in energy and biotechnology. Initiated by industry in close collaboration with national funding authorities, each Cluster has a technological 'roadmap', defining its most important strategic domains.

The EUREKA Umbrellas are thematic networks which focus on a specific technology area or business sector. The main goal of an Umbrella is to facilitate the generation of EUREKA projects in its own target area.

Early on the agri-food sector was identified by EUREKA as a very promising area, both for its growth potential in the future and for the position of the European countries in the world market, resulting in the Umbrella EUROAGRI - initiated in 1991 - aimed to generate new EUREKA projects in the "Agro-Industrial-Sector" - defined broadly as food industries, plant and animal production, including the non-food use of agricultural products.

This has now been replaced by EUROAGRI+

EUROAGRI, aimed to generate new EUREKA projects in the 'Agri-food sector' - defined broadly as the food and agriculture industries, but including non-food uses of agriculture such as paper and animal products. EUROAGRI achieved this through promoting the importance of cross-border R&D in this area and helping potential participants make useful contacts in other countries.

In addition, EUROAGRI made contact with other research programmes. EUREKA projects were funded to continue the work carried out within the EC's Framework Programme, which concentrates on pre-competitive research, and provides a 'next-step' towards implementing the results of the EC research Programmes at a more commercial level.

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• Newsletter / EUREKA Secretariat BELGIUM