Europe 2020

Accelerating digital transformation on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world has unquestionably become the single most powerful underlying driver of change across our societies and economies. No community, no sector, no sphere of human endeavour is immune, and there is no opting out. Moreover, we are just at the beginning of the real-world digital revolution. There can therefore be no decisive progress toward a fully functioning XXIst century partnership between the United States and Europe (of the sort first envisioned by TPN 25 years ago) without a common - or at least interoperable - “digital transformation” policy framework.

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.

Europe 2020 Strategy “Promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” places research and innovation at its core.1 The Strategy aims to promote smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. The Strategy, which proposes increased spending on R&D to 3% of total European GDP by 2020, is positioned as a key tool in implementing the Innovation Union2 -- a flagship initiative which provides a comprehensive set of actions for improved research and innovation performance through a seamless approach. Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation3 is a key tool in implementing EU Innovation Flagship. Horizon 2020 brings together key funding streams for research within the European Union with a Budget of €90.4 billion (current prices) to establish a single specific programme for implementation with a single set of Rules for Participation and Dissemination. Horizon 2020 emphasises the links between research and innovation, proposing to fund activities throughout the innovation cycle. As such, Horizon 2020 will foster public-private partnerships, emphasise involvement of SMEs throughout the R&D and innovation activities, make available risk finance for early stage projects and commercialisation of new technologies, and provide for improved intellectual property management within EU. Horizon 2020 has identified three major focal areas for funding, namely, “Excellent Science”, “Industrial Leadership” and Actions to address “Societal Challenges”. Section Two of this paper briefly describes these three focal areas with more detailed description of the proposed activities within “Health, Demographic Change and
Wellbeing” theme within the Societal Challenges area. The paper then discusses in Section Three the key contextual challenges face by the European member states, followed in Section Four by a brief overview of EU health system responses to these challenges, with gaps that need addressing. Section Five of this paper proposes a number of areas for consideration for funding within Horizon 2020 activities, and briefly compares these with the priority actions identified within Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing theme. A sub set of the proposed areas is identified as early candidates for funding, with a brief rationale for the proposition.