EU CISE 2020 is an important step towards the accomplishment of the European roadmap for CISE; the project attains the widest possible experimental environment of innovative and collaborative processes between European maritime institutions.EU CISE 2020 takes as reference a broad spectrum of factors in the field of European Integrated Maritime Surveillance, arising from the European legal framework, as well as from studies, pilot and R&D projects accomplished in the last three years; in particular, the project is based on:• the CISE Roadmap developed by DG MARE• the results of European pilot projects BluemassMed and MARSUNO,• the work performed by CISE TAG-Technical Advisory Group,• the European studies on maritime surveillance already carried out,• the results of Security research projects in progress, with particular reference to PERSEUS and SEABILLA• the needs of innovation expressed by the maritime stakeholders arising from their operational experience in managing maritime surveillance processes and systems at European, international and national levels.Under the guidance of a Stakeholder Board, EU CISE 2020 will manage in parallel the elaboration of the action plan for the operational validation of new elements of R&D needed to develop CISE (concepts of architecture, concepts of operation, standards of data and services, new services, new processes, ...), the development of an open European test bed for incremental advancement of CISE in the medium-long term, the independent Verification & Validation of the new elements of R&D, as well as the assessment of organizational instruments necessary to sustain the appropriate governance structure and to stimulate public-private cooperation.EU CISE 2020 draws a major space of opportunity for national and European maritime Institutions to collaboratively innovate their processes and systems, and for European enterprises to develop a new range of solutions and services competitive in the international market.