Brussels, Feb. 5th, 2015
Luca Gammaitoni, NiPS Lab director participated at the 1-day workshop on 'FET and Innovation'.
The workshop is organized by the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) unit of Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT), and had place on 5 February 2015 on the premises of the European Commission at Avenue de Beaulieu, 25, Brussels.
The Future and Emerging Technologies programme invests in transformative frontier research with a high potential impact on technology, to benefit our economy and society. FET provides a unique combination of high risk, long term, multidisciplinary and collaborative frontier research, which lays the foundations for radically new technologies. Innovation out of FET research is what can make a difference between having the best research and doing something useful with it, something that people will embrace, that will improve society and create better lives for all.
The workshop aimed at identifying ecosystems that can stimulate innovation from FET type of research and the actions necessary to put the ecosystems in place, identifying notably the ones that may need support at the European level.
During the workshop Gammaitoni advanced the need to find a proper funding instrument to fill the gap between FET funded research (challenging, high-risk, long-term) and main stream ICT funded programs that aims at short-term results. "We need to find a way to bridge the gap between proof-of-concept results, produced by the best FET projects, and products that are the declared objective of main stream ICT research", declared Gammaitoni that is coordinating the C.A. ICT-Energy where more 50 groups are represented.