On 14th of March ICT Cluster and Small Business Standards (SBS) with the methodological support of European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) organized seminar “Education about Standardisation for SMEs”. This seminar brought together experts from European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Small Business Standards (SBS), Bulgarian Standardisation Institute (BSI), European Committee for Standardisation (CEN), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation (CENELEC), representatives of ICT Cluster and universities from Bulgaria and Balkan Region.

The seminar gave the participants knowledge and understanding on the ETSI curriculum about EaS (Education about Standardisation) and its approach.

To reach the above mentioned goals the seminar’s agenda included the following modules.

• Standardisation, challenges and opportunities for SMEs
• Standardisation – a key tool for ICT SMEs
• Standardisation and competitiveness for SMEs
• Education about standards for ICT SMEs

The results reached in the seminar are as follows:

• The four universities – New Bulgarian University, Technical University of Sofia, University of Skopje and Technical University of Cluj – Napoca expressed their interest in the creation of Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes on standardization, based on the ETSI methodology. The universities’ representatives accepted the challenging task to create and organize respective courses on standardization this autumn.
• The representatives of BDS, Bulgarian experts of ETSI and ICT Cluster decided to start closer collaboration among them on the presented topics during the seminar.
• SMEs’ representatives defined their interest on certain standards. ICT Cluster will provide them with the necessary information.