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Project Partners
– European Committee for Standardization (CEN)
– European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC)
– CEN-CENELEC Management Centre (CCMC)
– European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
– European commission – Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry and Entrepreneurship (DG GROW)
– European Free Trade Association (EFTA)
European Committee for Standardization (CEN)
CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, is an association that brings together the National Standardization Bodies of 34 European countries. It was officially created as an international non-profit association based in Brussels on 30 October 1975.
Its mission is to foster the European economy in global trading, the welfare of European citizens and the environment. CEN provides a platform for the development of European Standards and other technical documents in relation to various kinds of products, materials, services and processes.
CEN is one of three European Standardization Organizations (together with CENELEC and ETSI) that have been officially recognized by the European Union and by the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) as being responsible for developing and defining voluntary standards at European level.
The new EU Regulation on European Standardization has been adopted by the European Parliament and by the Council of the EU and will enter into force as from 1 January 2013. It provides the legal framework within which the European Standards Organisations (CEN, CENELEC, ETSI) will operate. The text of the new EU Regulation (1025/2012) is published in the Official Journal of the European Union (see Issue L316 of 14 November 2012).
These standards have a unique status since they also are national standards in each of its 34 Member countries. With one common standard in all these countries and every conflicting national standard withdrawn, a product can reach a far wider market with much lower development and testing costs. ENs help build a European Internal Market for goods and services and position Europe in the global economy. More than 60.000 technical experts as well as business federations, consumer and other societal interest organizations are involved in the CEN network that reaches over 600 million people.
CEN supports standardization activities in relation to a wide range of fields and sectors including: air and space, chemicals, construction, consumer products, defence and security, energy, the environment, food and feed, health and safety, healthcare, ICT, machinery, materials, pressure equipment, services, smart living, transport and packaging.
In a globalized world, the need for international standards simply makes sense. The Vienna Agreement − signed by CEN in 1991 with ISO (International Organization for Standardization), its international counterpart − ensures technical cooperation by correspondence, mutual representation at meetings and coordination meetings, and adoption of the same text, as both an ISO Standard and a European Standard.
For more information see: www.cen.eu
European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC)
CENELEC is the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization and is responsible for standardization in the electrotechnical engineering field. CENELEC prepares voluntary standards, which help facilitate trade between countries, create new markets, cut compliance costs and support the development of a Single European Market.
CENELEC creates market access at European level but also at international level, adopting international standards wherever possible, through its close collaboration with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), under the Frankfurt Agreement.
In an ever more global economy, CENELEC fosters innovation and competitiveness, making technology available industry-wide through the production of voluntary standards.
Through the work of its members together with its experts, the industry federations and consumers, European Standards are created in order to encourage technological development, to ensure interoperability and to guarantee the safety and health of consumers and provide environmental protection.
Designated as a European Standards Organization by the European Commission, CENELEC is a non-profit technical organization set up under Belgian law. It was created in 1973 as a result of the merger of two previous European organizations: CENELCOM and CENEL.
For more information see: www.cenelec.eu
CEN-CENELEC Management Centre (CCMC)
The close collaboration between CEN and CENELEC was consolidated at the start of 2010 by the creation of a common CEN-CENELEC Management Centre (CCMC) in Brussels.
By setting common standards that are applied across the whole of the European single market, CEN and CENELEC ensure the protection of consumers, facilitate cross-border trade, ensure the interoperability of products, encourage innovation and technological development, include environmental protection and enable businesses to grow. Products and services that meet these European Standards (ENs) can be offered and sold in all of the participating countries.
CEN and CENELEC bring together the national standards agencies of 34 countries. Our network involves business federations, commercial and consumer organizations, environmental groups and other societal stakeholders. More than 60,000 technical experts from industry, research, academia and other backgrounds are directly involved in our work.
Together, CEN and CENELEC provide a platform for the development of European Standards and other technical specifications across a wide range of sectors. We work closely with the European Commission to ensure that standards correspond with any relevant EU legislation.
CEN and CENELEC also cooperate with respectively the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to reach agreements on common standards that can be applied throughout the whole world, thereby facilitating international trade.
For more information: http://www.cencenelec.eu
The European Commission’s Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry and Entrepreneurship has the mission to promote a growth-friendly framework for European enterprises. It has a key role in the Europe 2020 agenda of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.
To promote growth in Europe, we focus on six objectives:
- Ensure an open internal market for goods in the EU;
- Strengthen the industrial base in Europe;
- Encourage the growth of SMEs and promote an entrepreneurial culture;
- Promote industrial innovation to generate new sources of growth;
- Support the internationalisation of EU businesses;
- Support the European presence in space and satellite navigation.
Our flagship initiative is “An Industrial Policy for the Globalisation Era” which sets out a number of actions to improve the business environment, notably for SMEs, and to support the development of a strong and sustainable industrial base able to compete globally.
DG Grow is playing an active role to promote smart, sustainable and inclusive growth throughout all industrial sectors, including service industries like tourism. The policy of Grow contributes to making Europe a more competitive, innovative and resource-efficient economy, ready to tackle today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.
They are responsible for the product legislation in a number of sectors to ensure a well-functioning internal market. They manage large industrial programmes in space and satellite navigation (GALILEO and Copernicus). They are the voice of SMEs in European policy-making. In short, they are pursuing a “MISSION GROWTH” to lead Europe in the new industrial revolution.
DG Grow employs around 1,000 people in its departments and units and is responsible for a budget of some € 1.5 billion. European Union has an active standardization policy, which promotes standardization in support of better regulation, and as an instrument for the competitiveness of European industry. This policy is centered upon the recognized European standardization system, and a partnership to implement the ‘New Approach’. In its Communication “The role of European standardization in the framework of European policies and legislation” of 18 October 2004, the Commission highlighted its standardization policy and formulated recommendations aiming to improve the European standardization system, by:
- Continuing to make more extensive use of European standardization in European policies and legislation;
- Improving the efficiency, coherence, visibility of European standardization and of its institutional framework (including the effective participation of all interested parties and the financial viability of European standardization);
- Continuing to promote international standards while ensuring that they are consistent with the objective of EU policies, and to enhance the role of European standardization in the international context and the visibility of its achievements.
More information about the “Europe 2020” strategy can be found on the European Commission’s central Europe 2020 website: http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/index_en.htm
European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is a leading international Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) standards organization, producing globally-applicable standards for ICT, including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, broadcast and internet technologies.
ETSI is an independent, non-profit organization with a 30- year track record of technical excellence in the ICT sector, and with a widely respected non-discriminatory IPR policy. Available to all, our standards are freely accessible on ETSI website.
- Over 48000 standards published in total
- Over 1800 standards published annually
- 19 million downloads annually
ETSI has more than 900 member organizations worldwide, drawn from 65 countries and five continents. It’s diverse community includes private companies, research entities, academia, government and public bodies as well as societal stakeholders. At ETSI, large and small member organizations work together to create high quality standards – enabling interoperability in a multi-vendor, multi-network, multi-service environment.
As the effects of globalization permeate further and accelerate, ETSI is providing business and industry with efficient solutions for accessing and developing new and established world markets via standardization.
ETSI is officially recognized by the European Union to support EU regulation and policies, ETSI standards are key enablers for the Single European Market.
It has a special role in Europe. This includes supporting European regulations and legislation through the creation of Harmonised European Standards. Only standards developed by the three ESOs (CEN, CENELEC and ETSI) are recognized as European Standards (ENs).
ETSI has made a very significant contribution to European legislation by producing many Harmonized Standards to be used in the application of European Directives and supporting “EU policy initiatives” and EFTA policy issues such as the “New Approach”, other EU legislation (e.g. Electronic Fee Collection, the interoperability regulation under the Single European Sky (SES) initiative, the Electronic Communication Network and Services Framework Directives), mandated activity and other EU initiatives (e.g. eEurope and i2010).
Initially founded to serve European needs, high quality work and open approach to standardization has helped ETSI evolve into a European roots – global branches operation with a solid reputation for technical excellence. ETSI Standards are now used world over.
It makes its expertise in interoperability, and the standardization of some of today’s most important technologies, available to its Members and customers through a range of services for growing ideas and enabling technologies. There can be little argument that ETSI’s most significant technical success to date has been GSMTM, Global System for Mobile Communications. Introduced as a digital cellular technology to replace a plethora of incompatible analogue systems in Europe, GSM has become a global success, serving over two billion users in more than 200 countries world-wide.
Globally applicable ETSI Standards and Technical Specifications such as GSM™ (2.5 billion mobile connections), DECT™, TETRA and DVB are prime examples of the role ETSI is play in growing international markets.
ETSI also collaborates and work in partnership with different types of organizations around the world. This makes ETSI well placed to support its members who operate in an increasingly international and competitive environment. ETSI members benefit directly from over 110 partnership agreements with other fora and consortia, as well as international and regional Standards Developing Organizations around the world.
ETSI is a founding partner of two major international partnership projects, 3GPP™ and oneM2M, bringing together standardization bodies from Europe, China, India, Japan, Korea and the United States. The original scope of 3GPP™ was to produce globally applicable specifications for a system based on evolved Global System for Mobile communication (GSM™) core networks and the radio access technologies that they support. With over 680 members, 3GPP™ today provides complete system specifications for cellular telecommunications network technologies up to 5G.
Bringing together around 200 players from diverse business sectors, oneM2M was created to consolidate standardization of machine-to-machine and Internet of Things functions. The group provides a horizontal layer of functions commonly needed across different market sectors as well as a framework to support applications and services for the IoT. In April 2020 oneM2M was named ‘Top IoT Standards Body of the Year’ for the second year in a row at the 7th Annual Compass Intelligence Awards.
For more information visit: www.etsi.org
European Free Trade Association (EFTA)
The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is an intergovernmental organization set up for the promotion of free trade and economic integration to the benefit of its Member States. EFTA came into being on 3 May 1960 on the premise of free trade as a means of achieving growth and prosperity amongst its Member States as well as promoting closer economic co-operation between the Western European countries. Furthermore, the EFTA countries wished to contribute to the expansion of trade in the world at large.
EFTA was founded by the following seven countries: Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Finland joined in 1961, Iceland in 1970, and Liechtenstein in 1991. In 1973, the UK and Denmark left EFTA to join the EU They were followed by Portugal in 1986, and by Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995.
Today the EFTA members are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. In 1994, the Internal Marked of the EU was extended through the entry into force of the Agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA), which today comprises Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway and the 27 EU Member States.
Based on these overall goals, today EFTA maintains the management of the EFTA Convention (intra-EFTA trade), the EFTA Free Trade Agreements (third country relations) and the EEA Agreement (for the three EEA EFTA Countries). The EFTA Convention and the EFTA free trade agreements are managed from the Geneva office, the EEA Agreement from the Brussels office. In addition, EFTA’s Statistical Office in Luxembourg ensures close cooperation with EU’s Eurostat office.
The EFTA States jointly negotiate free trade agreements (FTAs) with partners outside the European Union in order to strengthen their competitive position and increase market access for their products. As a result, economic operators in the EFTA countries enjoy access to one of the world’s largest networks of preferential trade relations, which continues to expand thanks to an ambitious agenda of negotiations. Today, EFTA has 29 FTAs covering 40 countries and territories outside the EU.
The agreements are based on and seek to promote the multilateral rule-based trading system, as embodied in the WTO. Although EFTA’s membership is small, it is a world leader in the promotion of free trade. The EFTA economies are also consistently high performers as to competitiveness, ranking among the top 30 most competitive economies worldwide.
The EFTA countries and the European Commission closely cooperate on creating and implementing a European standardization policy. This includes parallel financing of standards-related work carried out by CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. EFTA Member States use the same standards as EU countries and have the same conformity assessment procedures. In order to ensure that public authorities and enterprises in the EEA EFTA countries abide by the rules of the EEA Agreement, the EFTA Surveillance Authority has been established in Brussels, which has close contacts and cooperation with the Commission. The EFTA Court based in Luxembourg deals with infringement actions brought by the Surveillance authority against an EEA EFTA State with regard to the implementation, application or interpretation of an EEA rule.
For more information about EFTA and the EEA Agreement see: www.efta.int