WINNER is an international research project under Framework Program 6 (FP6) of the European Commission. The main objective is the development of the new radio interface for systems beyond 3G. WINNER is part of the Wireless World Initiative (WWI), which is a series of cooperating projects in FP6 to develop future systems including all entities from a system perspective. The project is developing all system functions from layer 1 to 3 including cooperation mechanisms with legacy systems as part of the overall architecture for systems beyond 3G. Based on usage scenarios and propagation investigations, technical requirements are derived. The physical layer and higher layer protocols are designed. A new broadband radio interface requires newly identified frequency spectrum. WINNER is contributing to the international regulatory process in ITU-R towards the preparation of WRC 2007 (World Radiocommunication Conference). This paper provides an overview about the WINNER project and its activities.KEY WORDS: Broadband radio access; systems beyond 3G; wide-area systems; short-range systems.