Embedded intelligent devices are everywhere. They can now be found in items ranging from credit cards to washing machines, they are monitoring infrastructure ranging from railway lines to mobile phone networks.
Matching the pervasive nature of the technology, the ARTEMIS programme has from the outset taken a holistic approach to the research, technology development, innovation and skills creation that is required to deliver advances in an area of technology that is critical to so many industrial sectors, working in a distributed industrial context of innovation ecosystems, and encouraging both competition and collaboration.
Achieving this is not simple. We need to bear in mind, we are not a United States of Europe, so our approach has to be different from that in the United States of America. We need to align the national interests of all member states to effectively bundle cross-border resources.
Given this, our challenge as a joint undertaking was to arrive at a common programme in which these different interests were aligned and merged into a single common interest. Our decision to bring together resources and concentrate on key areashas been critical to achieving ARTEMIS’s objectives.
It enables us to create major footprints – and impact – in specific areas rather than see our efforts diluted by a lack of focus or duplication of research. This is one of the main reasons why our programme and projects have been successful, and it is also why we are much more than just another funding programme.
Key ARTEMIS pillars
This success is underpinned by the two key ARTEMIS pillars: thinking big and the having a pan-European dimension. These pillars are evident, for instance, in the recently completed SCALOPES (SCalable LOw Power Embedded platformS) project, encompassing eleven countries and 36 partners.
The knowledge gained in this project, which focused on a simultaneously reducing energy consumption and whilst boosting the performance embedded systems, is now readily available and can be used to help the industry partners, including SMEs, to spin off commercial products and services, for example, Internet routing systems.
It is a key strength that ARTEMIS is industry-driven and concentrates on core technologies to achieve a significant market impact. Our focus on bigger picture issues and requirements can generate complexity, because you have to get many parties facing in the same direction.
Our ability to do this is an essential distinction between ARTEMIS as a Joint Technology Initiative (JTI) and funding programmes like FP7. We have, for instance, been able to achieve much more impact through creating clusters, than would have been possible in a totally open FP7 call.
ARTEMIS Strategic Research Agenda 2011
Throughout the gestation and delivery of ARTEMIS we have always been aware of the need to be flexible and take account of the changing landscape, keeping up to date with new trends and emerging technologies in the field of Embedded Systems and their applications.
This led to the formulation of an updated Strategic Research Agenda, launched in May 2011 in Brussels, which now forms the basis of all our key research areas, project calls, and innovation activities.
Shape the right innovation climate
Part of the rationale for establishing ARTEMIS as a JTI was to reduce the administrative burden. It is essential to keep the overheads and the administrative load as low as possible. The ARTEMIS Industry Association, set up to foster the interests of its members, champions the simplification of rules, and it is clear that this mission to help shape the right innovation climate for Europe based on trust is already having an impact.
A recent study showed its industry-driven, cross-domain approach, plus the type and size of the partner alliances, is a key differentiator for ARTEMIS compared to other programmes like the Eureka software programme ITEA2 and to FP7. I also believe the pan-European impact is greater than in these other programmes, with the average number of countries involved in an ARTEMIS project between six and seven, and significant involvement of European SMEs.
There is no doubt that Embedded Systems are of ever-increasing importance as an enabling technology for many industrial sectors – underpinning the neural system of society. We are convinced that with the last call of the current ARTEMIS programme due to be issued in 2013, a successor programme of ARTEMIS is needed.
Klaus Grimm is President of the ARTEMIS Industry Association and chair of the Industry Research Committee of the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking
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