Network of Excellence in Wireless Communications

The network of excellence NEWCOM (Network of Excellence in Wireless COMmunications), active from March 2004 to February 2007, in aims at creating a European network that links in a cooperative way a large number of leading research groups addressing the Strategic Objective "Mobile and wireless systems beyond 3G", a frontier research area of the Priority Thematic Area of IST. 

The main dimensions of the NEWCOM vision are: 

• Strengthening, development and integration of research in the field
•  Empowerment of groups and individuals via dissemination activities
•  Effective use of produced knowledge via exploitation-commercialisation-standardization strategies.

To achieve these dimensions, NEWCOM implemented an elaborate plan of initiatives which revolve around the key notion and strategic choice of a Virtual Knowledge Centre: NEWCOM effectively acted as a distributed (decentralised) university, organised in a matrix fashion. The columns represent the seven NEWCOM (Disciplinary) Departments, characterised by basic research on well-established topics and grouping leading European researchers active in those topics. The rows will represent NEWCOM Projects, identified by important, "hot" problems whose solution requires multidisciplinary skills drawn from NEWCOM Departments and aggregated in a meaningful way to promote the problem solution.

The Joint Programme of Activities involved researcher exchanges, organisation of workshops and conferences, the preparation of graduate courses coordinated with the PhD programs of the academic partners to be diffused via NEWCOM high-speed network, the broad dissemination of scientific results, the promotion of entrepreneurship among its researchers, by setting up a policy of IPR encouragement and their exploitation through the creation of start-ups inside its distributed campus.

The "glue" connecting everything together is a set of tools for Integration, the unifying thread making all objectives and goals a feasible vision, and for Management, which maintains a clear separation between "administrative" and "scientific" tasks.

Link: http://www.newcom-project.eu/