2006 in the European Research Area opened with the launch of a coordinated call in 15 EU Member States for transnational research projects in the field of Micro and Nano Technologies

On 1 January 2006 the MNT ERA-Net project announced the launch of the first widely coordinated call for proposals in the field of Micro and Nano technologies. The project has joined 21 funding programmes of 17 EU Member States for the preparation of this pilot initiative, which will undoubtedly provide valuable first experiences on the challenges, as well as the benefits of such coordinated transnational actions.

The MNT-ERA-Net 2006 call invites transnational consortia to submit applied R&D project proposals including partners from at least two of the Member States involved in the initiative. The proposal submission process involves two phases: a pre-proposal phase and a full proposal phase. Throughout the process tight coordination of the national funding agencies is managed through a "Transnational Coordination Team", while the submission procedure relies on well-established processes normally applied by national/regional funding agencies and already familiar to proposers. Final decisions are made at the national/regional funding agencies, whom also manage the contracts and provide funding through their national/regional budgets. These new forms of transnational projects are expected to start by September 2006.     

About the MNT ERA-Net project:
The MNT ERA-Net project was launched in January 2004. It is supported through the FP6-Coordination programme. MNT ERA-Net will coordinate the currently fragmented research programmes and exchange good practice on aspects of programme design and management. The biggest impact is expected to come from promoting co-operation between national programmes. This could involve avoidance of duplicated effort and discouragement for spending on small programmes where co-operation at European level would be more cost-effective. The ERA-NET may have an additional role to play in the development of industrial standards for MNT – especially of the design of interfaces between micro-components.

Further information about MNT ERA-Net:
http://www.mnt-era.net/