Brussels proposes faster and more open standard-setting, and gives research a seat at the table. For Trust-IT Services, which has worked on European standardisation for more than fifteen years, the change is long awaited.
Somewhere in Europe this morning, a researcher charged her phone, tapped her travel card at a station gate and bought a tin of fish labelled as sustainably caught. She did not think about standards once. That is rather the point. Standards are the agreed rules that make a plug fit its socket, a payment go through and a label mean what it says. When they work, nobody notices them.
Behind each of those agreed rules is a long process involving engineers, companies, public authorities and, increasingly, scientists. On 6 October 2026, the European Commission proposed a new rulebook for that process. The proposed Regulation on European standardisation would replace the law that has governed the system since 2012 (EU No 1025/2012). It now goes before the European Parliament and the Council.
A slow clock in a fast world
The Commission’s case for change starts with time. A harmonised European standard, the kind businesses use to show their products meet EU law, currently takes around six years to develop. In fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and clean technology, six years can cover more than one generation of the technology itself.
The proposal sets deadlines at each step of the process. It also adds fallback routes for when the usual system cannot deliver: the Commission could turn to other recognised standards bodies or, as a last resort, write common technical specifications itself. The Commission expects the average development time to fall to around four years.
Why researchers should care
The proposal recognises standardisation as a way to turn research results into real-world use. It calls for researchers, universities and startups to be actively involved, and for European standards to build on EU-funded research. Research and standards have long run on different clocks: a project lasts three or four years, while a standard has taken six. Faster timelines and lower barriers make it more likely the two clocks meet.
The difficulty for most research teams has never been a lack of relevant results. It has been knowing where to start: which committee, which body, which moment. That is the gap HSbooster2 works on. HSbooster2, a Horizon Europe initiative coordinated by Trust-IT Services, offers free expert support to research projects funded through all EU and national programme.
The Proposal Support Service helps consortia build standardisation into a proposal before funding is secured. The Mentoring Service pairs ongoing projects with an expert for up to three months to map their standardisation landscape. The Standards Accelerator Service gives projects ready to contribute up to six months of hands-on support, from drafting a contribution to preparing for working group meetings. A Training Academy runs alongside all three.
A small company with a long record
For Trust-IT, the proposal confirms a direction it has followed for years. The company’s standardisation work began with SIENA, whose 2012 roadmap on research e-infrastructures was endorsed by the European Commission. Since then, StandICT.eu and SEEBLOCKS.eu have funded hundreds of European experts and SMEs to take part in ICT and blockchain standardisation. INSTAR and InDiCo-Global bring European interests into international standards work. EDU4Standards, IAM4RE.eu and WIDERA build standardisation skills in universities, research organisations and Europe’s widening regions. FIDELIS supports shared standards for open science repositories. And VeriFish, coordinated by Trust-IT, turned a framework for verifiable seafood sustainability claims into work towards a CEN Workshop Agreement. That is the tin of fish from the opening paragraph.
Across these projects, Trust-IT has developed a consistent methodology for linking research with standards. It also runs its own platform, TRUST-GRANTS, for the open calls that fund experts where funding is needed.
The proposal still has a long way to go. Parliament and the Council will debate, amend and negotiate it before it can become law, and the details may change along the way. Its direction, however, is clear. Europe wants its standards made faster, by more people, and with research closer to the centre of the process.
At Trust-IT, the reasoning behind the work is simple. The team believes in standardisation because it sees how quietly it makes our lives better: the plug fits, the payment clears, and the label on the tin can be trusted.
