As of January 2025, the Horizon Europe programme has funded over 15,000 projects, representing a substantial investment in European research and innovation. Yet technological excellence alone does not guarantee real-world uptake.

What is in fact needed are shared practices, specifications or guidelines that can align innovations with existing technical and legal frameworks, ensuring a more rapid and widespread adoption. In other words, every project needs to take into consideration the standardisation practice if it really wants to make a difference.

This is why MOZART has just published a new policy brief compiling the many lessons learnt over its four-year lifetime, with a clear overview of the numerous benefits that standardisation can bring to any research project.

The document proves useful both for organisations intending to apply to the Horizon Europe programme and for European Commission evaluators, who may consider it relevant that a project consortium has already established standardisation pathways for the technologies in question.

What the document highlights is the importance of involving one of the many organisations that develop standards, such as international bodies like ISO and IEC, or national entities such as UNI – Ente Italiano di Normazione, which can grant an immediate standardisation-by-design approach.

This was precisely MOZART’s strategy, which, by involving UNI from the onset, committed to integrate standardisation practices into the development of AUTOMAT.

This implied training project partners on the importance of standardisation, as well as drafting a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) to support the development of future European Norms in the field of food-handling robotics.

You can download the document here.

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