Stuart Campbell, TIE (leader) stuart.campbell@tieglobal.com
Mayte Garcia, Atos Origin teresa.garciag@atosorigin.com
Pierluigi Ritrovato, MoMa ritrovato@momanet.it
Witold Staniszkis, Rodan Systems witold.staniszkis@rodan.pl
Véronique Pevtschin, Engineering veronique.pevtschin@eng.it
01/2008 – SME Involvement in R&D calls
This seminar will be held next 14th January 2008 in Brussels.
More information at http://www.cistrana.org/events/index_sme_seminar.htm
12/2007 – UEAPME constitutes PIN- SME
The Pan European ICT & eBusiness Network for SME will be constituted by UEAPME next December 3rd in Brussels. PIN-SME will be the first European association representing the interest and stances of ICT SMEs.
A representative of the NESSI SME WG will attend this meeting.
More information at www.pin-sme.net
10/2007 – NESSI SME activities presented during eChallenges 2007
NESSI organised a workshop during eChallenges 2007 and focus its presentation on SMEs and their impact on future implementations of NEXOF. Mayte García presented the SME WG and its activities.
More information on the conference at www.echallenges.org
07/2007– NESSI presented during 16th ICT Mobile and Wireless Communications Summit
NESSI presented at the 16th ICT Mobile and Wireless Communications Summit on the networking event of HAGRID and Hungary for FP6. The networking event will be co-organised by 5 SSA projects (HAGRID, EPISTEP, Hungary for FP6, Ideal-ist and Star-Net). More information on the conference at http://www.mobilesummit2007.org/
04/2007 – Survey carried out among NESSI SME members
The SME Working Group is surveying the SMEs already members of NESSI to better understand their needs and expectations, as well as their availability to participate actively in NESSI - Survey results will be posted on the Web in May 2007. Interested in voicing your views?
Please contact Mayte Garcia at teresa.garciag@atosorigin.com
01/2007 - NESSI's activities on SMEs introduced during European ICT Conference on Research and TEchnology Development in Turkey
Jose Maria Cavanillas, vice-chairman of the NESSI Steering Committee, introduced the SME Working Group at this event. Over 200 ICT SMEs attended the conference. More information can be found at http://www.ictconference-istanbul.org/
Today, European SMEs employ more than 74 million people while at the same time generating the majority of radical innovations and technological breakthroughs. As such, SMEs constitute one of the pillars for economic and social development in Europe.
In January 2007, NESSI’s Steering Committee continued its road to the future of services by highlighting the need to ensure that SMEs become actively involved in the definition, evolution and implementation of NESSI.
A large proportion of European SMEs are ICT stakeholders, delivering ICT solutions. Therefore, full participation of these ICT SMEs is key for NESSI and NESSI has drafted a strategy to reach out to ICT SMEs.
Though SMEs using services are equally important to NESSI, a clear separation is made between the two different roles of providing services versus using them, and therefore a separate community dedicated to user needs has also been foreseen in NESSI. This SME strategy focuses on the ICT SME stakeholders who deliver ICT solutions.
The activity is under the umbrella of the NESSI Steering Committee and the emerging SME Working Group.
The goal of NESSI’s SME Strategy is to formulate and represent ICT SMEs’ interests throughout the NESSI environment, from Committees to Working Groups to Strategic Research Agenda. At the same time, the strategy aims to ensure that SMEs are not only informed but can also, if they so choose, become actively involved in the future of NESSI.
Recognising that one barrier to SME participation is the cost and time involved in attending physical meetings, the Working Group’s aim is to implement the SME strategy while at the same time setting up an environment that will foster remote collaboration, active participation and limit the need to participate to different meetings.
This approach complements the existing activities of NESSI, as in parallel all NESSI Working Groups remain open to SMEs who wish to get more involved in a specific Working Group. The NESSI SME Working Group will not focus on domain specific issues but on the contrary will highlight the cross-cutting issues that directly relate to SMEs, independently of a specific application domain.
One important area of activity for the SME Working Group will be, for instance, to analyse, convey and foster implementation of “SME friendly” approaches of NEXOF, the NESSI architecture.
The strategy calls for different phases:
§ Assessment of the SME Community in NESSI. This task has been defined to profile the existing NESSI SME constituency more precisely in terms of sector, interests, size, knowledge/implementation of software and services.
§ Enlargement of the SME Community in NESSI. As mentioned earlier, the current constituency should be increased to ensure full relevance of SME views. This step is critical to the success.
§ Support of the SME Community within NESSI. This task aims to detail the interaction between SMEs and the NESSI bodies and Working Groups.
§ Engagement of SMEs within the environment of NESSI. The goal of this task is to elaborate and convey the SMEs point of view to the NESSI entities.
§ Engagement of SMEs beyond the environment of NESSI. This aims to link and coordinate, when relevant, the activities of the SME Community Group with respect to related initiatives in other ETPs or at national level.
To view details, please download the SME Working Group Manifesto.