The Community has the objective of strengthening the scientific and technological bases of the Community industry, thereby insuring a high level of competitiveness at international level. To this end the Community shall promote all the research activities deemed necessary, in particular by encouraging undertakings, including small and medium-sized enterprises, research centres and universities in their research and technological development activities. The central role of research was recognised by the 2000 Spring European Council in Lisbon which set a new strategic goal for the next decade: to become the most competitive and knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and grater social cohesion.The overriding aim of the Seventh Framework Programme is to contribute the European Union becoming the world’s leading research area. This requires the Programme to be strongly focused on promoting and investing the world-class state-of-the-art research, based primarily upon the principle of excellence in research.In this connection the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have worked out the Draft Decision on adoption of the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities. The objectives and activities of the program cover: Cooperation (i.e. supporting the whole range of research actions carried out within the framework of the trans-national cooperation in the area of health, food, agriculture and biotechnology, information and communication technologies, nano-science, nano-technologies, material and new production technologies, energy, environment (including climate change), socio-economic science and humanities, space and security), Ideas (i.e. supporting “investigator-driven” research carried out across all fields by individual national or trans-national teams in competition at the European level), People (i.e. strengthening, quantitatively and qualitatively, the human potential in research and technological development in Europe) and Capacities (i.e. supporting key aspects of European research and innovation capacities).The Draft Decision includes annexes providing detailed clarification of the ideas, activities, measures, procedures and funding schemes of the Programme as well as the draft commission declaration with regard to Article 6 hereunder.