Future and Emerging Technologies

Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) go beyond what is known! Visionary thinking can open up promising avenues towards powerful new technologies.

The visionary aspects and exploratory characteristics of FET might make it sound like a kind of magic, but the mission of FET is actually very concrete: to turn Europe's excellent science base into a competitive advantage.

FET actions are expected to initiate radically new lines of technology through unexplored collaborations between advanced multidisciplinary science and cutting-edge engineering. It will help Europe grasp leadership early on in those promising future technology areas able to renew the basis for future European competitiveness and growth, and that can make a difference for society in the decades to come.

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

The FET programme has three complementary lines of action to address different methodologies and scales, from new ideas to long-term challenges:

FET Open funds projects on new ideas for radically new future technologies, at an early stage when there are few researchers working on a project topic. This can involve a wide range of new technological possibilities, inspired by cutting-edge science, unconventional collaborations or new research and innovation practices.
FET Proactive nurtures emerging themes, seeking to establish a critical mass of European researchers in a number of promising exploratory research topics. This supports areas that are not yet ready for inclusion in industry research roadmaps, with the aim of building up and structuring new interdisciplinary research communities.
FET Flagships are 1-billion, 10-years initiatives where hundreds of excellent European researchers unite forces to focus on solving an ambitious scientific and technological challenge, like understanding the Human Brain or developing the new materials of the future, such as Graphene.