This year's Scoreboard shows that despite almost unprecedentedly difficult economic conditions RD investment remains an important strategic priority for top firms worldwide.

Calls for greater openness and transparency are exerting increasing pressure on the government to transform its traditional reactive information dissemination methods into a mode that facilitates proactive disclosure.

- POP2: a scheme that modifies the admission conditions and rights and stays focussed on HSW with 3 sub-options: (a) a more inclusive, flexible and adaptable scheme for a wider group of HSW that facilitates procedures and grants more rights and intra-EU mobility, (b) a more selective scheme for the "top" HSW that grants even more rights and mobility, and (c) a two-tier scheme combining (a) and (b).

The experience or the knowledge gained in the projects, increased knowledge of a study area, improved working practice, improved teaching and management skills, greater awareness of other cultures and EU institutions, new curricula, together with a more innovative culture in the institutions remained after the projects finished.

In the face of this challenge of a world marked by growing inequality and demographic pressure - still intense in several major regions of the southern hemisphere - we can choose between two attitudes: either we can opt for a security-based strategy whereby the richest countries protect themselves, seeking in their technological superiority a coat of armour to keep them out of harm's way, or, and this is the approach that the UE is trying to promote, the more advanced countries can strive in partnership with the big countries and major regional groupings in the South for a fairer distribution and more sustainable management of natural resources - this is the path ...[+++]of globalisation harnessed and made to serve mankind.

In the face of this challenge of a world marked by growing inequality and demographic pressure - still intense in several major regions of the southern hemisphere - we can choose between two attitudes: we can opt for a security-based strategy whereby the richest countries protect themselves, seeking in their absolute technological superiority a coat of armour to keep them out of harm's way, or - and this is the approach that we are trying to promote in the EU - the more advanced countries can strive in partnership with the big countries and major regional groupings in the South for a fairer distribution and more sustainable management of natural resources - this is ...[+++] the path of globalisation harnessed and made to serve mankind.