Research and innovation support

Connecting research and innovation with future ICT standards

Fueling innovation through standards

Why standards for Research?

Getting involved in standards groups at the right stage of the research and innovation cycle is crucial for driving the success of emerging technologies. Identifying potential topics for standardisation early in research activities ensures that the necessary standards are ready when industry needs them—paving the way for new technologies to reach the market faster.
Standards make technologies interoperable and widely adoptable. This means solution providers can build real-world applications using compatible components and scale with confidence.

How ETSI supports Research & Innovation

The Role of Standards in ICT Innovation

Every ICT device, application, or service relies on standardised technologies at multiple levels. These standards are the backbone of interoperability, enabling different technologies to work seamlessly together. They foster global markets and support networked development, where innovation builds on established technology platforms.

ICT standards represent the cutting edge of technology development and serve as a vital resource for researchers. They shape markets and ensure that research can lead to new products, services, and even entirely new markets. For this reason, successful ICT research must ultimately feed into standardisation activities—turning ideas into widely adopted solutions.

Benefits of Research in ETSI

Researchers benefit from interactions with ETSI’s technical groups and gain early exposure to and feedback from the standards community, which is essential for considering the results of research before taking them to full-market deployment. Research results must influence standards to have a market impact.

Industry benefits from faster exploitation of relevant research results and feedback from a much wider community. Research input is highly relevant to the early stages of product development, when multiple alternative technical solutions must be evaluated. Standards need innovative contributions from researchers to advance the state of the art.

ETSI services for researchers

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Dedicated team

to guide and advise researchers on how to best channel research results into our committees and get full value from their membership and participation in ETSI.

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Open and free workshops

An excellent entry point for researchers, providing the perfect platform to showcase their research results using presentations, poster sessions and even demos. Ideal place to disseminate research results to large audiences, gain essential feedback and identify the potential next steps for standardisation.

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Technical activities

ETSI member research organisations may contribute to any of the existing ETSI technical groups, both for the creation of new work items and for the revision of existing deliverables. They may drive the creation of “new” technical activities in ETSI destined to standardise innovative technologies that are not yet covered by the ETSI work programme.

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Recognition of your research results

We can offer researchers the review and recognition of their research results through presentations at ETSI workshops and even inclusion of research concepts in ETSI specifications following review in ETSI technical groups.

In 2026, ETSI launched its very first Research and Innovation Awards to recognise the outstanding contributions of the research community to ETSI’s own standardisation work.

Discover our Research & Innovation Awards

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Free ETSI deliverables and work programme

All ETSI deliverables are publicly available free of charge, on our website. This means researchers may follow and download ETSI deliverables and refer to them in their research projects.

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Support for EU project proposals

We maintain active relations with relevant European Technology Platforms, Public Private Partnerships and Joint Technology Initiatives.
This creates a research information hub and community that may be used to share ideas and discuss potential areas for work in both standards and research.

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Support for EU project proposals

ETSI is present in a number of EU research projects, and can provide participation, advice, partnership and Letters of Support to EU project proposals when the appropriate criteria are met. Including real areas for standardisation in project proposals will often increase the quality of the proposal and the probability it is accepted.

Collaboration with National Standards Organisations (NSOs)

We collaborate closely with NSOs and with Small- and Medium-sized enterprises. These entities are often well-positioned to identify research related to new technologies and user needs arising from specific market sectors.

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Teaching material on standardisation

We have developed a set of teaching materials on standardisation, including a set of videos covering essential topics, a comprehensive textbook, “Understanding ICT Standardisation: Principles and Practice”, and an extensive set of over 380 slides to be used as teaching aides. ETSI may also provide speakers/lecturers to universities in order to further present the multiple aspects of standardisation.

 

Learn about research

8 Point Plan for Researchers

Standardisation is a business process which is driven by industrial and commercial considerations. Reaching a collective agreement on a technology through consensus can take time, but is surprisingly fast when interests are aligned. The following 8-point plan provides researchers with a roadmap for bringing research results into Standards.

  • ETSI’s Research Strategy

    ETSI’s Strategy  identifies clear actions to “Strengthen the linkage between R&D and standardisation”. These include:

    • Increasing the participation and contributions by (Horizon Europe and other) research programmes / projects to ETSI Technical Committees (TCs), Industry Specification Groups (ISGs) and Software Development Groups (SDGs) as well as 3GPP and oneM2M
    • Influencing the work programme of research programmes in order to facilitate exploitation of the final research results in ETSI standards activities
    • Informing all ETSI members of new technological trends emerging from innovative research projects and seeking to build bridges between such projects and ETSI activities
    • Informing and educating both Academia and the global research community of the ongoing ETSI technical work, so it may be used as a basis for their research activities
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Research, Innovation & Academia in ETSI

ETSI has over 900 members from Europe and beyond, with more than 140 of them from the categories Research Public, University and Research Private. Universities, research bodies and SMEs have reduced ETSI membership fees designed to encourage participation to standards.

ETSI seeks to increase the value and visibility of our academic and research members through the use of dedicated events, webinars, educational materials, and onboarding of research results into our technical groups as well as providing ETSI support / partnership in selected EU research projects.
We are looking for additional ways to support our ETSI research and academic community and would like to get your feedback and ideas on where we can help.

Should you have any suggestions or questions, simply contact [email protected].