FET and the market. How can radically new technologies change the IT business

How can radically new technologies change the world in which we live? And how can they get out of labs to provide impulse to new products and services? Does visionary research stay away from markets, or should industry be involved since projects early stages?

These and other questions will animate the first FET 2020 (Future Emerging Technologies) conference hosted at the Big Innovation Centre in London on the 20th -21st of June, under the title of "Competitiveness and Innovation in the Context of FET: how to stimulate the transfer of ideas with market potential from FET to downstream research, to high-tech SMEs and industry". The conference will gather about 60 stakeholders from major European research institutions, to representatives of large corporations to innovative start-ups, and is the first one of a cycle of three events organised by the FET 2020 initiative, supported by the European Commission via the COFET project. Later this year, another conference will deal with the issue of communicating complex research to the large public and early next year the final event will bring together representatives of national funding agencies to imagine better ways of coordinating European and Member States' efforts in financing science driven and visionary goals oriented projects.

"What we intend to achieve – says Erich Prem, says Erich Prem, chief strategist of Eutema, an Austrian research consultancy coordinating the COFET project – is to bring stakeholders to express their views on how the economic impact of their research can be maximised. Whether by involving business at the start of projects, or by looking at the investment community or by other creative ways, we'll get experts to throw new, and we hope also, provocative ideas on the table".

The London conference will be structured in a plenary session for Day I and in parallel sessions on the morning of Day 2. "We thought that breaking down the audience in small groups – says Ian Morgan of Optimat, a Glasgow based market research firm partner of COFET - would bring us benefit in going deeper on given themes such as the type of support that FET research might get from investors, or on how to handle relations between researchers and industry. Hopefully we'll get more concrete and innovative suggestions from those groups, to be shared at the end of the event".

The conference will also provide the FET perspectives of different stakeholders, including those of Jani Kivioja, Nokia lead researcher working at the Graphene project, one of two FET flagships selected for massive funding by the European Commission in the years to come together with the Human Brain Project. Extracts from the conference will be made available shortly after the event on the FET 2020 website at www.fet2020.eu

Provided by Future Emerging Technologies