Future and Emerging Technologies (FET)

FET mission is to foster radically new science and technology based on novel, exploratory and high-risk ideas through purpose-driven and interdisciplinary collaborative research. It is aimed at foundational breakthroughs with transformative and long-term impact. FET goals are to strengthen European leadership putting Europe in the driving seat for research and innovation as a global partner; to facilitate alignment of EU and national research agenda, to achieve a better return on investment through increased efficiency, sharing of risk and increased exploitation potential; and to enhance impact on European innovation. They are complemented with a variety of activities to create the best conditions to make this happen and for maturing and structuring emerging research fields, research communities and research practices. The FET programme has three complementary lines of action to address different methodologies and scales, from new ideas to long-term challenges.

 

enlightened Work Programme

 

FET Open

It supports early-stage joint science and technology research around new ideas for radically new future technologies. It will explore new foundations for radically new future technologies by challenging current paradigms and venturing into unknown areas, inspired by cutting-edge science, unconventional collaborations or new research and innovation practices.

  • A bottom-up selection process widely open to any ICT research ideas;
  • Attractive to new and high-potential research and innovation players;
  • Mechanism for early detection of promising new areas, developments and trends.

FET Proactive

It nurtures emerging themes and structure communities by addressing a number of promising exploratory research themes. The main benefits of this structuring yet exploratory approach are:

  • Emerging novel areas that are not yet ready for inclusion in industry research roadmaps, and building up and structuring of new interdisciplinary research communities around them. 
  • Making 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.

The present work programme supports emerging themes and communities in:

  • Global Systems Science: to help integrate the abundance of data on social, economic, financial, technological and ecological systems available today and elaborate societal responses across policy domains and cross-cutting authorities;
  • Knowing, doing and being: cognition beyond problem solving: to establish new foundations for future robotics and other artificial cognitive systems with clear progress beyond current capabilities and design concepts;
  • Quantum simulation: to contribute to solving problems in fundamental and applied science using new tools based on quantum physics and quantum technologies;
Towards exascale high-performance computing: to deliver a broad spectrum of extreme scale HPC systems and to develop a sustainable European HPC Ecosystem. 

FET Flagships

They support ambitious, large-scale, long-term, science-driven, goal-oriented, roadmap-based research initiatives tackling grand challenges in Science and Technology requiring a common European effort and long term support (up to 10 years). They are expected to provide transformational impact on science, technology and society, lead to novel innovation clusters in Europe and facilitate alignment of national and regional research efforts. FET Flagships require a long-term commitment of all key stakeholders sharing a common scientific vision and a joint effort of EU and national programmes to provide a large shared financial support. FET will provide the main EU support in H2020 of the two FET flagships already chosen under FP7: 'Graphene' and 'Human Brain Project' (HBP).