About EUREKA
EUREKA projects
Bottom-ap and market oriented
Despite their technological or scientific diversity, EUREKA projects are unique in that their results are market oriented. The project consortium - generally comprised of SMEs, research centres and large companies - not EUREKA, dictates the way the project comes together, its duration and the amount of money invested in it. This 'bottom-up' strategy, as it is known, along with its flexible approach to pan-European co-operation, stands EUREKA apart from its counterparts in the ERA.
EUREKA projects fall into two broad categories:
- Innovative projects have ready-to-market results, representing a significant advance in their particular sector. The average European encounters the results of EUREKA innovative projects every day: navigation systems in cars; key components to make high-speed trains safer; multifunction smart cards; film special effects; improved diagnoses for heart disease, and novel technologies to replace environmentally damaging batteries.
- Clusters are long-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 information and communication technologies (ICT), but also in energy and biotechnology. Through the MEDEA+ microelectronics Cluster, for example, three European companies are now ranked in the world top 10 chip manufacturers - previously there were none.
€ million |
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| MEDEA+ | Microelectronics | 3,708 |
| ITEA | Software-intensive system | 1,351 |
| CELTIC | Telecommunications | 150 |
| EURIMUS II | Microsystem Tecnology | 118 |
| PIDEA+ | Packaging and Interconnections | 42 |
| EUROGIA | Sustainable energy | 6 |
| - in june 2006, EURIMUSII and PIDEA+ merged to form a single Cluster - EURIPIDES | ||