Digital Europe programme: public consultation

Today the European Commission launched a consultation on the orientation of the first two years of its proposed  Digital Europe programme for 2021-2027 period. €9.2 billion are expected over this period. The programme targets 5 key areas:

- supercomputing

- artificial intelligence

- cybersecurity

- advanced digital skills

- and ensuring a wide use of these digital technologies across the economy and society.

Programmes' draft orientatons

Stakeholders are asked to give their views on the programme's draft ‘Orientations',

Digital Europe programme will take over Horizon 2020 first experiments for “European Digital Innovation Hubs” which support the digital transformation of companies (especially SMEs and mid-caps) and/or public sector organisations on a large scale, through co-investments with Member States.

Draft orientations emphasis, amongst others, the need in Europe-wide data spaces and testing and testing and experimentation facilities for artificial intelligence in the areas of health, environment/climate, mobility, manufacturing and energy.

When it comes to cybersecurity, the orientations aim to deploy a pan-European quantum communication infrastructure and to support the set-up of a certification scheme for cybersecurity products.

On technologies for digital public services, the programme foresees the deployment of a federation of pan-European cloud services. Technologies such as blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) are seen as a crosscutting enabling technology that can support the validation of transactions.

Next Steps

The EU institutions reached a provisional agreement on Digital Europe, excluding budget-related issues, on 13 February 2019. The formal approval of the programme depends on the final negociation of the 2021-2027 European Budget (Multi annual Financial Framework MFF). Meanwhile the Commission has started to prepare the Digital Europe programme’s budget implementation.

A public survey is open from 25 July to 25 October 2019 and consists in a number of online questions.