The Vikings were venturesome seafarers, but also explorers, traders and settlers. From the Baltic Sea region they spread through Europe and the North Atlantic in the period of 800-1050 AD, known as the Viking Age.
The Vikings most often sailed along the coasts, but they were the only European seafarers at the time to dare travel so far that they lost sight of land. They didn't have any of today's modern navigation instruments, but during the Viking era they developed navigational aids^* that all seafaring peoples in Europe used until the invention of the sextant in the 1700's.

The Estonian eVikings

.. project aims to integrate Estonian leading IST research and development labs and companies through the everyday collaborative RTD projects much better with the European academia and industry, innovation networks. We also aim to facilitate international exploitation of abroad developed RTD results in Estonia and help the Estonian labs in disseminating their solutions in the Europe, world-wide.

Pilot phase of the project, supported by the European Commission, starts building up the Virtual Centre of Excellence for IST RTD by strengthening the existing innovation infrastructure opens additional synergies and enables to benefit in a cost-effective way from the main objective of the project - European integration in information society technologies research and technological development.

Objectives

The Estonian eVikings project concentrates it's efforts, during the pilot phase under this contract, on:

• strengthening the links between the Estonian and European IST research and development communities, starting from the closest neighbours around the Baltic Sea, but keeping still focus on Europe as a whole;
• supporting the strife of the Estonian R&D labs' to become modern eVikings of the Information Society, through assistance to introduction of new European co-operative research and development projects (either European framework, bi- or multilateral);
• special attention is paid to updating and giving advice for better focusing of the national research and technology policies.

During this project pilot phase evaluation of the Estonian IT cluster is conducted and the technology foresight review compiled for Estonia. After that consensus-based independent national IT R&D policy recommendations are prepared for the national authorities and research agenda is established for the Virtual Centre of Excellence.

The Estonian eVikings project will support the above mentioned goals by strengthening the local, regional and European RTD co-operation on information society technologies by establishing a Virtual Centre of Excellence in IST RTD. While a uniformly high quality of research must be the leading criterion, a well-designed virtual centre will bring together excellence in different fields, creating a truly synergistic effect. Therefore, a multidisciplinary research agenda ought to be an essential characteristic for such centre.

The work plan of Estonian eVikings project includes major package of awareness, training and policy planning activities on successful establishment of new RTD projects and exploitation of the results at international markets. All this brings the European dimension essentially through the full life cycle of the national RTD policy and R&D project planning.

Marek Tiits, project manager Tarmo Kalvet, analyst Tarmo Pihl, analyst

23/03/2001 ist@irc.ee