Press Release: Researchers send in thousands of new ideas for European research

Universities, companies and research centres have sent more than 15,000 ideas for European research projects to the European Commission. More than 100,000 groups and institutions were involved in drafting the ideas; the proposed teams involve potentially several hundreds of thousands of researchers across Europe and beyond. In a radical departure from previous programmes and for the first time, on March 20, 2002, the European Commission asked the scientific community to say what they see as the most promising topics for cutting edge research in the 6th Research Framework Programme, due to be launched in autumn 2002.