The growing attention given to research and innovation over the past decades has resulted in increased amounts of public funding being channelled to research and innovation, but also to a variety of policies and funding programmes being put in place in Europe, in order to maximise the quality and impact of this funding.
FET projects often generate new and sometimes unexpected opportunities for commercial or societal application. This topic aims at funding further innovation related work (i.e. activities which were not scheduled to be funded by the original project) to verify and substantiate the innovation potential of ideas arising from FET funded projects and to support the next steps in turning them into a genuine social or economic innovation.
Ongoing research efforts show that the translation of the working principles of the Digital Internet to the routing of freight, thus creating the Physical Internet (PI), has the potential to be a real game-changer. In the PI world freight travels from hub to hub in an open network rather than from origin to destination directly. Each parcel is routed automatically and at each section it is bundled for efficiency. In the PI network of networks many (if not all) transport and logistics services would be accessible on demand to all users.
The technologies that will form the backbone of the energy system by 2030 and 2050 are still under development. Promising technologies for energy conversion are being developed at laboratory scale and need to be scaled up in order to demonstrate their potential value in our future energy system. These new technologies should provide more flexibility to the energy system and could help adapting to changing climatic conditions.
The challenge is to make Europe the best place in the world for collaborative research and innovation on future and emerging technologies that will renew the basis for future European competitiveness and growth, and that will make a difference for society in the decades to come.
Proposals should address one of the following topics:
In order to foster responsible research and innovation (RRI) in nanotechnologies, innovative processes are needed to improve the responsiveness of research & innovation processes to public values and concerns, and to ensure that research & innovation truly respond to societal challenges and take into account the social and environmental consequences from the outset.
The continued introduction of active safety systems has the potential to reduce accidents. Nevertheless, the risk of collision and particular crash situations will still remain. An approach will be needed that will ensure improved crash safety in those circumstances. A number of societal trends add to this challenge such as the ageing population, an increase in the number of powered and non-powered two-wheelers and the introduction of green, light, sub-compact cars.