Get Money Up to €2.7 Billion for Emerging Tech Development!

Looking forward to understanding what the pillars of H2020 are made of?

You are in the right place. For now, let’s take a look at the first pillar, Excellent Science.

The Excellent Science pillar has several objectives, one of them is Future and Emerging Technologies ( FET).

We are going to examine more closely the FET objective, what it is and who it is for, in this article.

The €2,7 billion come from H2020 Excellent Science pillar for “high-risk innovative ideas”

The purpose of FET is to turn Europe’s excellent science base into a competitive advantage.

It supports collaborative research and fosters scientific collaboration between disciplines.

The aim is to extend Europe’s capacity for innovation. So if you have “high-risk innovative ideas” as it is described, you are welcome.

Under Horizon 2020, FET actions have been allocated a provisional budget of 2 696 million euros.

The funds are distributed into 3 lines of actions for science and tech projects

The FET program addresses different methodologies and scales. It goes from new ideas to long-term challenges and has different lines of actions.

FET Open

This line of action supports the early stages of science and technology research. It corresponds to the time when scientific research begins to be translated into applied research and development, between TRL 1 and 5 ( Technology readiness levels). It also supports innovation around new ideas for future technologies.

FET Open calls for collaborative research and innovation actions that satisfy certain criteria:

• Breakthrough scientific and technological target.
• Foundational.
• Novelty.
• High-risk.
• Long-term vision.
• Interdisciplinary.

FET Open wants to create the best possible conditions for collaborative research. It encourages unconventional collaborations, new research, and innovation practices, as you can see in this infographic from Europa article on FET Open:

The high number of proposal submissions (more than 2000 for the academic year 2014/15) shows there’s a real competition for funding. Thus, success is not easy to reach. If you want more tips on how to succeed in FET-Open, go to this post from Timo Hallantie, Head of FET Open Unit.

FET Proactive

The FET Proactive call regroups 3 initiatives: Emerging themes and communities, FET ERANET Cofund and FET ERANET Cofund in Quantum Technologies.

This line of actions seeks to gather as many European researchers as possible, working on promising exploratory research topics. When we say exploratory research, it means on topics that are between TRL 1 and 3.

Another goal of FET Proactive is to structure new interdisciplinary research communities and help them to develop by encouraging researchers from different disciplines to work together. This would spread to various areas such as :

• Future technologies for societal change, in which an example of a topic would be «New science for a globalized world».
• Biotech for a better life, with for example «Bio-electronic medicines and therapies».
• Disruptive information technologies, developing topics such as «Hybrid opto-electromechanical devices at the nano-scale».
• New technologies for energy and functional materials, with «Ecosystem engineering».

FET Flagships

The objective of this line of actions is to turn scientific advances into real opportunities for innovation, growth, and jobs. Also, it addresses some major societal challenges in Europe.

FET Flagships aims at creating the skillful multi-disciplinary researchers that are needed in Europe. It is a model for long-term European collaborative research in the context of the European Research Area (ERA).

The Flagships initiatives a total budget of €1 Billion euros and as they are long-term they are expected to run for 10 years or so. The last Flagship call closed in June 2014, and the results are expected to be published from now on. Two projects are still running under H2020: Graphene and The Human Brain Project. They aim at developing the new materials of the future and understanding the human brain.

More than 94 actions were funded in Europe since 2016

On the Europa website, you can find the map of the participation per country for FET projects in the framework of Horizon 2020 program, as of June 2016.

You can see the number of participants per country and also the distribution of funding.

Until now, 94 actions with a signed grant agreement were taken.

We can see that the biggest number of projects’ participants comes from Germany, the UK, and France.

The list of topics to focus on to get money for 2018-2020 is available online

An open consultation was organized from February to April 2016 about FET Proactive and FET Flagships schemes among others.

In total, 83 contributions were received for both of them.

The aim of the consultation was to prepare the FET work program 2018-2020.

It was about identifying new themes and new technological direction to develop.

OBSERVE is a FET Coordination and Support Action that aims to identify new opportunities and directions for research for new and visionary technologies.

The FET consultation was then mapped into OBSERVE clusters. The main result is a list of 34 clusters of topics of interest for FET.

Here are some examples of the topics of interest for the future of FET funding:

• Space exploration.
• Synthetic food.
• Understanding and influencing human behavior.
• Robot reasoning.
• Forest health.
• Time as money.

And there are many more.

Other inputs will be gathered, by the FET Advisory Group, or from consultation with experts, with national funders representatives, and with industry or societal representatives.

To sum up, FET is part of the Excellent Science pillar of H2020. It is designed to reinforce and extend the excellence of the EU in scientific areas and to make its innovation system more competitive worldwide.

FET supports collaborative research and if you are interested in applying to one of the new topics for 2018 don’t hesitate to check out Scientist database for partners.