Science

Manufacturing is the most important source of economic development and growth. The economic importance of manufacturing goes far beyond its contribution to GDP, for which the European Commission has put forward a target of 20 %. The manufacturing industry in the EU is worth € 7.000 billion in turnover and it accounts for 80% of the total EU exports and 80 % of the private R&D expenditure. Moreover, it provides jobs for 30 million employees directly and is the source for twice as many jobs indirectly, the vast majority in small or medium-sized enterprises. To maintain its importance the industry in Europe needs modernisation. Last year the contribution of manufacturing to EU GDP has declined to 15.1 %. To be able to reverse this trend and start an Industrial Renaissance in Europe, we need more investment in innovation, resource efficiency, new technologies and skills. In the conclusions of the European Council of 20-21 March 2014, the Heads of State and Government underlined that industrial competitiveness should be at the centre of policy-making at all levels. It is an important signal for both the public and the business sector, to which they should respond with specific measures facilitating the industrial change. That’s why advanced manufacturing is one of the six priority areas for the modernisation of industry in the European Union. The market uptake of advanced manufacturing and clean technologies can improve productivity, resource efficiency and competitiveness in any manufacturing sector. To speed up this process a dedicated Task Force on Advanced Manufacturing for Clean Production was created in 2013. One year after its creation, the Task Force has drawn up a set of targeted actions aimed at advancing the European industry. In order to give Europe a competitive lead in the new industrial revolution, we need to engage in a partnership between the European Commission, Member States and industry. Europe needs industry and industry needs Europe. Get prepared for the future of manufacturing!

This report emerges from the Pew Research Center’s efforts to understand public attitudes about a variety of scientific and technological changes being discussed today. The time horizons of these technological advances span from today’s realities—for instance, the growing prevalence of drones—to more speculative matters such as the possibility of human control of the weather.

Forward looking activities (FLA) are used for the preparation and the formulation of EU policies.
Foresight and Forecasting allow to elaborate long term visions and to assess economic, social and environmental impacts of policies. Between 2007 and 2010 around twenty research FLA initiatives have been launched by the Seventh Research Framework Programme under the theme “Socioeconomic Sciences and Humanities” in the following fields: Globalisation, Europe and neighbouring countries; ERA (European Research Area), science, technology and innovation; Evaluation of policies and modelling of post-carbon society; Mapping, preferences, visions and wild cards.

This paper briefly outlines possible futures scenarios of science 2.0, analyses its implications and draws policy recommendations “fit for the future”. Science 2.0 is more than open access: it refers to the emergence of open, data-intensive and citizen science across the full research cycle, from data gathering to reputation management.
Science 2.0 is here to stay and it is already growing well beyond individual projects. On the supply side, an ecosystem of services and standards is emerging. Adoption is growing and becoming mainstream already in some phases such as preprint publication, reference sharing, open access publication. Impact is already visible and will address some of the most burning issues of science, such as the slowness of the publication process and the challenge of reproducing research results.
Based on the extrapolation of existing trends and on analogies from different domains, we anticipate a set of “scenario snippets”:
- The full integration of data, publications and intermediate product will enable reproducibility by default. But adoption of such sharing culture will require time and a new system of incentives based on impact metrics and career structure.
- Evaluation metrics will become multidimensional, granular and instantaneous;
- The work of scientist will change with greater collaboration and independence from institutions.
Overall, we will see an unbundling of services, which are today integrated. Research will be separated from teaching, data collection from data analysis, publication from reputation management. Different specialised service will emerge and displace the incumbents such as publishers and universities. At the same time, the value chain will reorganise through vertical integration around new platforms. These could be built around unexpected positions in the value chain, including electronic reading devices.
In terms of implications, these scenario show opportunities and risks in three main areas.

The study focused on the development of an approach for the ‘design of a European foresight process that contributes to a European challenge-driven R&I strategy process’. The involvement of Member States (MS) in forward looking activities (FLA) at EU-level is considered important and beneficial, and is proposed to be facilitated at an early stage through the Council High Level Group on Joint Programming (GPC), the most relevant MS-led group in this context. The process of involving MS is in particular relevant ahead of the planning of the next framework programme after Horizon 2020 (Horizon II).

Open Innovation has been a growing topic of both practice and research for over a decade. The term originated from the USA but has spread globally into many industrial sectors. This paper has a number of purposes:
- To define Open Innovation, OI.
- Outline the history of Open Innovation and the evidence for its success or otherwise in promoting innovation and contributing to new industries.
- Discuss the connection with Forward Looking Activities (FLAs), Open Access and Open Source software.
- Discuss possible policy options for the EC in relation to OI.

Europe is one of the global leaders in strategic foresight. From a continent that was mired in its own troubled and conflict‐ridden past, Europe has been gradually emerging over the past few decades as a region that wants to jointly and confidently embrace its future. The European Union is widely acknowledged as playing a key role in this transformation. Its very existence is forcing its member states and their citizens to explore new forms of governance in order to remain globally competitive in a future world that keeps changing at vertiginous speeds. Its high‐level initiatives such as ‘Europe 2020’ intend to push the European policy agenda towards ambitious objectives in areas such as employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate/energy. But nowhere is the forward‐leaning nature of the EU more visible than in the research area, where the European Union has been funding long‐term transnational framework programmes in many of the most promising fields of scientific discovery. The size and scope of many of these programmes are truly unique – even in comparison to analogous ones in the United States, Japan or (increasingly) China.
Foresight is an important ingredient in this overall research agenda. Across its different research priorities, the EU may very well fund more foresight work than any other actor in the world. And yet many of these efforts remain largely uncoordinated. Most research projects that address ‘the future’ tend to start from scratch and to do their own foresight work in their own fields with their own methods. This paper will examine whether it might be possible to develop a shared European future‐base by describing some experiences that were accumulated by a small European policy think tank from The Netherlands – the The Hague Center for Strategic Studies – that is primarily working in the field of strategic studies. HCSS has been performing foresight work for various (national and multinational) public and private customers for about a decade now, and has also started building a more systematic ‘future‐base’ containing insights from a broad variety of global foresight studies.
This paper will start by introducing the idea and the rationale behind such a ‘future‐base’, will then describe the method used by HCSS and present some examples from foresight studies published in 2012 in the field of security. It will conclude with a brief analogous analysis of a number of EU FP7‐funded studies in order to show how EU research priorities could be compared to some of the findings from a future‐base like exercise.

The study takes a model of Horizon Scanning approaches defined by the SESTI consortium (Scanning for Emerging Science and Technology Issues), then reviews five approaches to Horizon Scanning from Singapore, Australia, Mateafore, iKnow and Sigmascan against this model, and finally makes suggestions about the implications for an EC Horizon Scanning framework. The key recommendations to EFFLA on HS tools and databases in the EC DG R&I context are:
a) Hub – characteristics and location
There is a tension between the “quality” of the scanning – in the sense of originality, depth etc – and its integration with the policy agenda. Horizon Scanning should be the responsibility of a “Node” of dedicated staff within DG Research & Innovation. These staff would be required both to access a wide range of sources in a neutral manner, and remain sufficiently connected to the sense-making and other stages of the Foresight process to be influential.
Although there will a formalised structure of information gathering, it is important that the “Node” also engages with experts and policy-makers informally and frequently. The node must not become an organisational silo.
b) Relation to Strategic Foresight Processes
Careful consideration should be given to what communication “products” are produced. There is a need to balance information overload with pertinent and timely inputs. “Products” should range from very brief daily email news feeds that people can sign up for, through to major set-piece conferences.
c) Role and characteristics of HUMINT
We can expect an increasing use of semi-automated tools within the HS process, as they permit a wider scope of information search and a degree of avoidance of expert bias. But throughout the study, interviewees have been consistent that deciding what signals will emerge from the noise has to come through debate and conflict. Ideally, the overall HS process should include both manual and semi-autom

The world faces unprecedented global challenges related to depleting natural resources, pollution, climate change, clean water, and poverty. These problems are directly linked to the physical characteristics of our current technology base for producing energy and material products. Deep and pervasive changes in this technology base can address these global problems at their most fundamental, physical level, by changing both the products and the means of production used by 21st century civilization. The key development is advanced, atomically precise manufacturing (APM). This report examines the potential for nanotechnology to enable deeply transformative production technologies that can be developed through a series of advances that build on current nanotechnology research.