The nanostair strategy : a new strategic proposal to impulse standardization in nanotechnology research

Nanotechnology is considered one of the key technologies of the 21st century within Europe and a Key-Enabling Technology (KET) by H2020. The production of knowledge in nanotechnology is very intensive as a great amount of research projects is launched each year on national and European level. Standardization has been identified in H2020 as one of the innovation-support measures by bridging the gap between research and the market, and helping the fast and easy transfer of research results to the European and international market, providing interoperability between new and existing products, services and processes. The development of new and improved standards requires high quality technical information. This creates a fundamental interdependency between the standardization and research communities. Integration of European research and standardization is a recurring topic, widely recognized and promoted by European Commission (EC), European Standardization System (ESS) and other interested parties. In addition, agents of ESS and European Innovation System (EIS) have been or are being involved in projects related to that topic (e.g. FP6 -INTEREST, FP7 nanoSTAIR, BRIDGIT). In the frame of project nanoSTAIR (GA 319092), a European strategy to support the transfer of knowledge gained through research to standards and standardization deliverables and impulse standardization in research, either at national or European level, has been proposed. The nanoSTAIR strategic approach is based on the systematic analysis of the barriers that have been identified and of the possible ways to overcome these barriers, involving all relevant actors and identifying the possible benefits for them. The nanoSTAIR consortium identified and selected a set of 4 strategic objectives, aimed at bridging barriers and facilitate connections between research and standardization: 1) Ensure that nanotechnology standardization is visualized as a demand to be satisfied by researchers, research organizations and research projects, 2) Provide support to research projects, from the European Standardization System (ESS), 3) Provide support to ESS, from the research community and 4) Establish and deploy a sustainable platform of services - nanoSTAIR - to facilitate the interaction between research and standardization. In parallel, 53 targeted strategic activities - at European level only, national level or in both areas - were proposed to deploy these four strategic objectives. By type of barrier concerned, the largest number of actions (78%) is directed towards the awareness and recognition of standardization, as a strategic pillar to establish direct connections between research and standardization. Actions to provide resources and actions to improve the standardization process represent the remaining 22%, equally distributed (11% each). In this context, the present paper describes the European scenario on research and standardization in nanotechnology and the key players, and presents a proposal of a European strategy to impulse direct “pipelines” between research and standardization