CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, and CENELEC, the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization, have agreed to combine their efforts in facilitating the access of Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to standards work.
SMEs make up 99.8% of enterprises in Europe and employ more than 90 million people . Despite this, SMEs and especially micro enterprises do not play a leading role in either creating or using standards. However, standardization allows companies access to the state of the art in technology and thereby strengthens their innovation capacity. It creates a level playing field for the market access of companies and the introduction of new products and services.
Read why standards are essential to SMEs and how standards organizations are addressing SMEs.
Communication on Small and Medium Sized Enterprises COM (2007) 592 - the European Commission noted that “Standardization plays a key role in fostering the competitiveness and growth of SMEs by increasing the quality of their products and consumer confidence. The EC also fully supports the initiatives of the European Standardization Organizations targeted at SMEs.”
Council Conclusions on Standardization and Innovation of September 2008 further invite ‘the European and national bodies to facilitate participation in standardization by all interested parties, in particular representatives of small and medium-sized enterprises, and encourages the European Commission and the Member States to promote the participation of those stakeholders in standardization work.’
Small Business Act - recognized that both the EC and the European standards bodies have made good progress in promoting SMEs’ access to the development and use of standards. The SBA highlights the availability of (national) SME Helpdesk and stresses that more needs to be done in cooperation with SMEs.
Single Market Act - identifies that the introduction of product standards at European level has been a key tool for ensuring that citizens are offered high-quality goods and services (...). A clearer framework may also be required for services standardization to ensure a consistent approach to services
standards across the single market. The SMA proposed the following standards-related actions:
- Proposal 6: The Commission will propose a legislative reform of the standardisation framework in 2011 to make standard-setting procedures more effective, efficient and inclusive and to extend the scope of the procedures from goods to services.
- Proposal 9: The Commission will propose an initiative to establish a High Level Group on services to businesses in order to study deficiencies in the market and issues of standardisation, innovation and international trade in sectors such as logistics, installations management, marketing and advertising.
CEN and CENELEC agreed to identify and address the issues SMEs may face when getting involved in standardization and thus set up two specific projects – the SME Standardization Toolkit (SMEST) and the SME Access to European Standardization project.
To better coordinate and monitor the progress on implementing the recommendations made, the members of CEN and CENELEC decided to create in 2010 a joint SME Working Group of CEN-CENELEC members, with the participation of NORMAPME, the CEN and CENELEC associate member responsible for SME inputs into European standardization, and observers from the European Commission.
The CEN-CENELEC SME-WG Chair is Mike Low from BSI, and Andreea Gulacsi from the CEN-CENELEC Management Centre provides the Secretariat. Updated information on the SME-WG will be avaibale on this webpages in due course.