Editorial Introduction - EC relevant programmes for research and exploitation of results.

One of the workshops organized during the ESEM Conference on Engineering and Medicine (Stuttgart, 25-28 April 1993) was dedicated to this theme. The following three papers correspond to three out of five oral presentations which were made at the workshop; the first two, which are not included here, dealt with Telematics applied to health care, better known as the AIM (Advanced Informatics in Medicine) programme of the EC, and with the EC Biomedical and Health Research programme. These two EC research programmes have been presented and discussed elsewhere, and accordingly are better known now among the interested scientific community in Europe. In that workshop, the interesting aspect was to present some possibilities for support which are offered by the EC downstream, once research has been successful enough to lead to possibilities for industrial development and marketing, which is compulsory if any innovative medical device or drug is to be applied in the health care system. It had been thought interesting to introduce such possibilities and discuss them within the Stuttgart conference, because, as is often noted, whereas in Europe, research is quite productive, in terms of innovative ideas, the transfer to industrial development frequently raises difficulties, often reaching situations in which innovations originating in Europe are industrially developed elsewhere in the world and re-introduced in the European