2. FUTURE AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) activities will concretise different logics of intervention, from completely open to varying degrees of structuring of topics, communities and funding, structured around three strands - FET Open, FET Proactive and FET Flagships. Supporting a large set of early stage, high-risk visionary science and technology collaborative research projects is necessary for the successful exploration of new foundations for radically new future scientific knowledge and technologies. By being explicitly non-topical and non-prescriptive, this activity allows for new ideas, whenever they arise and wherever they come from, within the broadest spectrum of themes and disciplines, and it actively stimulates creative out-of-the-box thinking. Nurturing such fragile ideas requires an agile, risk-friendly and highly interdisciplinary research approach, going well beyond the strictly technological realms. Attracting and stimulating the participation of new high-potential actors in research and innovation, such as young researchers and high-tech SMEs, is also important for nurturing the scientific and industrial leaders of the future. Novel areas and themes need to be matured, by working towards structuring emerging communities and supporting the design and development of transformative research themes. The main benefits of this structuring yet explorative approach are emerging novel areas that are not yet ready for inclusion in industry research roadmaps, and building up and structuring of research communities around them. It makes the step from collaborations between a small number of researchers, to a cluster of projects that each address aspects of a research theme and exchange results. This will be done in close association with the priorities "Industrial leadership" and "Societal challenges". Research initiatives within this strand are science- and technology-driven, large-scale, multidisciplinary and built around a visionary unifying goal. They tackle grand science and technology challenges requiring cooperation among a range of disciplines, communities and programmes. The scientific and technological advance should provide a strong and broad basis for future innovation and economic exploitation, as well as novel benefits for society of a potential high impact. The overarching nature and magnitude implies that they can only be realised through a collaborative long-term and sustained effort. A FET Advisory Board, including scientists and engineers of the highest repute and expertise, will provide stakeholder input on the overall scientific and technological strategy, including advice on the definition of the work programme. FET will continue to be science- and technology-led, supported by a light and efficient implementation structure. Simple administrative procedures will be adopted to maintain the focus on excellence in science-driven technological innovation, encourage initiative and combine speed in decision-making and flexibility with accountability. The most appropriate approaches will be used for probing the FET research landscape (e.g. portfolio analysis) and for involving communities of stakeholders (e.g. consultations). The aim will be for continuous improvement and for the search for further ways to simplify and improve procedures in order to ensure that these principles are met. Assessments of the effectiveness and impact of the FET activities will be carried out, complementing those at programme level. Given its mission of fostering science-driven research towards future technologies, FET strives to bring together actors from science, technology and innovation, including, where appropriate, users, and to the extent possible from both public and private sectors. FET should therefore play an active and catalytic role in stimulating new thinking, new practices and new collaborations. FET Open groups activities for an entirely bottom-up search for promising new ideas. The high risk implied by each such idea is countered by exploring many of them. Efficiency in terms of time and resources, low opportunity cost for the proposers, and undisputable openness to non-conventional and interdisciplinary ideas are the key characteristics for these activities. Light and fast continuously open submission schemes will seek for promising new high-risk research ideas and will include tracks for new and high-potential innovation actors such as young researchers and high-tech SMEs. To complement FET Open activities, activities under the priorities "Industrial Leadership" and "Societal Challenges" may foster radically new use of knowledge and technologies. FET Proactive will regularly open calls on several high-risk, high-potential innovative themes, funded at such a level that several projects can be selected. These projects will be supported by community building actions that foster activities such as joint events, development of new curricula and research roadmaps. The selection of themes will take into account excellence in science-driven research towards future technologies, potential for creating a critical mass and impact on science and technology. A number of large-scale focused initiatives (FET Flagships) could be implemented subject to the positive outcome of FET preparatory projects. They should be based on open partnerships that enable the voluntary combination of Union, national and private contributions, with a balanced governance that allows programme owners to have appropriate influence, as well as a large degree of autonomy and flexibility in the implementation, enabling the Flagship to follow closely a broadly supported research roadmap. The selection of topics to be implemented as Flagships will be based on scientific and technologial excellence and will take into account the unifying goal, the potential impact, the integration of stakeholders and resources under a cohesive research roadmap and, where appropriate, the support from stakeholders and national/regional research programmes. These activities shall be realised using the existing funding instruments. Activities in the three FET strands are complemented by networking and community-based activities for creating a fertile and vibrant European base for science-driven research towards future technologies. They will support the future developments of the FET activities, foster the debate on implications of new technologies, and accelerate impact.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-04 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.