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Why should interdisciplinary high-risk research on disruptive technologies be supported?

EFFECT Project

28 March 2018 - updated 3 years ago
21 comments
Total votes: 13

This topic was discussed during the workshop “European Parliament European Leadership through Disruptive Technologies: Future and Emerging Technologies Towards 2030” organized by the European’s Parliament ITRE Committee and the EFFECT project. The event took place on the 7th of March at the European Parliament (Brussels) and brought together parliamentarians, EU officials, industry experts, scientists, academics, members of the FET Advisory Group and the Horizon 2020 FET Flagship Interim Evaluation Committee.

Discussion focused on how to best maintain Europe’s position as the cradle of science-driven technologica innovation, and on how to ensure to secure solid prospects for FET, in the post-H2020 EU research and innovation programme (FP9). An overview of key findings and recommendations defined during EFFECT event are available in the Brief Conclusion.

We would like to hear also your thoughts on this topic. You can publish your contributions as comments (below).

The deadline for giving inputs to this consultation is May the 31st, 2018.

If you want to know more about the observations that came from the workshop you can watch the video-interviews with the speakers and read these resources.

Views of some of the speakers on why FET interdisciplinary high-risk research on disruptive technologies should be supported.

“I think adequate funding for Future and Emerging Technologies is characteristic of growth and innovation policies” Patrizia Toia – Vice-Chair ITRE Committee

“The role of FET is also building a community of researchers with multidisciplinary skills that is able to bring the latest knowledge into new frontiers” Khalil Rouhana, DG CONNECT

“For start-ups or SMEs it is hard to allocate budget in the early stages of high risk projects. Here is where Future and Emerging Technologies are jumping in, giving possibilities to small companies to research what may change the world in the future” – Olivier Frey, inSphero

"Mobile internet is something imagination has created. There is a need to allow researchers to think about crazy ideas that can change the world. Not ideas that are in a ivory tower, but thinks that can have an impact”- Paul Lukowicz, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

“If we want that our industry in Europe to play a leading role in innovation, we must invest in basic research but also in the transformation of research into technologies. That means taking high risks and have high benefits. It is not possible to have high benefits, high values without taking risks” - Maria Chiara Carrozza, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa

FET in numbers:

The importance of the FET programme is well summarised by the following figures: around 25% of FET projects lead to patent applications within three years of completion; roughly 40% include partners from high-tech research small and medium enterprises; one in eight lead to a start-up company within three years of finishing.

Resources:

EFFECT Brief Conclusion

The Future &Emerging Technologies (FET) programme

FET projects portfolio

From great Science to thrilling Technology, European Commission

FET Open booklet, Research Executive Agency

Funding — Awareness — Scale — Talent (FAST): Accelerating Breakthrough Innovation, European Commission

Visionary and collaborative research in Europe: Pathways to impact of use-inspired basic research, FET Traces Coordination and Support Action

The Future of FET, FET Advisory Group

Graphene Flagship leaflet

Human Brain Project leaflet

Quantum Technologies factsheet

FETFX web platform

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Comments

Angel Sánchez,

21/05/2018 17:56

Truly relevant advances are typically not within the borders of established disciplines. A discipline arises in most cases from an already consolidated one when a breakthrough opens the door to new ways of thinking. Then, after a few (sometimes, more than a few) years of effervescence, possibly involving new breakthroughs spawning new fields, the topic becomes mature and advances become incremental. Those shouldn't be downplayed, as often they are very important in bringing scientific ideas closer to applications, but they are not disruptive.

The breakthroughs behind truly relevant advances come, therefore, from outside the established discipline or field, and as a consequence they are intrinsically interdisciplinary. To give just one example, quantum computing is a truly new and important research field nowadays that arises when combining the exotic properties of matter at the quantum level with the foundations of computer science, two subjects that are in principle totally unrelated. This is the kind of interdisciplinarity I refer to in this discussion, and the kind of interdisciplinarity that deserves a lot of support because it is, as discussed above, the only way to come up with disruptive innovations.

In this sense, one source of interdisciplinarity that remains largely unexploited is a higher level one, namely the ground between the social sciences and STEM. Social sciences have a key role to play in combination with the "hard" ones beyond just being kind of invited spectators that assess the impact of STEM advances in society or how to involve society with STEM. In a FET project that is about to finish, I've led a team of social scientists, computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians to look at human behavior in a new way that goes beyond behavioral/experimental economics or social psychology. By focusing on understanding how large groups of people behave and how individuals interact with each other within those, we have been able to bring in tools from complex systems science and from machine learning to shed light on the resulting, emergent, group/societal behavior. Here, the knowledge of physicists and mathematicians about complex networks and the knowledge of computer scientists about machine learning and other AI techniques, and also about simulation, have been instrumental in achieving novel results that are becoming a breakthrough in economics and sociology. For once, it is STEM who is providing benefits to the social sciences but, when we started our research, everybody from both sides told me that I was crazy and I was going nowhere, because what I wanted to do (large scale experiments and automatic behavior detection) could not be done. It was a risky project, of course, and I can see a thousand steps where it could all have gone wrong, but it haven't. And the output is really disruptive. This is what makes me truly confident that a bright future lies ahead of us if we combine social sciences with STEM, both working at the same level, in risky projects with the proper support.

Matteo MASCAGNI,

21/05/2018 10:06

A clear and sharp boundary between disciplines is simply no-existent anymore and there is always a contamination, an interaction among them.
We live within a "liquid transformation" where any kind of thinking does not have a proper and defined shape anymore. The new way of supreme thinking should always adapt to the shape of the “container” and also dynamically change it if and when needed.
Nowadays a disruptive innovation is mainly the finding of a connection, a unexpected link among different disciplines.

Funding the mainstream programs by separating and supporting broken up topics in separated single calls is a clear political choice in order to support each time a constituency, a lobby group etc. but it is simply unrelated to Science needs anymore.

As a result more than before both Science and Technology need an interdisciplinarity program like FET.

FET should not support just interdisciplinarity but also intra-, cross-, multi-, trans-disciplinarity and different calls should be implemented in order to support each of them.

The FET evaluation system should be probably radically revised because it does not work properly but FET program is still essential and crucial to Science and Technology.

Giulio Ruffini,

14/05/2018 00:06

The future is much nearer than we think. The pace of development in science, technology and their impact on society by the creation of new industries is accelerating. With this acceleration comes turbulence and "mixing": opportunities arise from the interaction across fields. This is, of course, positive, although opportunities can become threats if you are on the wrong side of the wave.

I think this is partly a sign of the maturation of science and the blurring of the concept of "hard" versus "soft" science. It is soon all going to become “hardened” science across disciplines: mathematically grounded, computationally explored and quite possibly executed in the marketplace in the short to medium term. The reach of computational tools is rapidly expanding to the life sciences, for example, from drug discovery to genetics to neuroscience, and the impact is going to be both enormous and swift. Not to talk about the tsunami of changes that the development of disruptive technologies such as quantum computation and AI (and their melding!) will generate in many fields. First come, first get. Teams have to be assembled without fences, the boundaries are dissolving.

My main interest is in applied clinical neuroscience – we develop medical devices for applications such as epilepsy and neurodegeneration. The future of the field is increasingly computational and quantitative: a melding of neuroscience, biology, physics, mathematics and computer science. The translation to clinical practice adds another layer of complexity, including business and regulatory considerations. All will be key to reach patients – our mission. It is a fascinating unfolding story, and very interdisciplinary. And we are here because of FET*.

FET provides a European, meritocratic space, and an opportunity for researchers in different areas as well as entrepreneurs to co-develop the future in the new arena of the 21st century. It should continue to provide a bridge between academia and high-tech entrepreneurship. I don't think that FET should solely focus on "science-to-market" breakthroughs, of course (especially short-minded, short-term ones), but it is important that this is considered along with brilliant, basic, longer-term, interdisciplinary revolutionary science exploration. I have found this to be particularly fruitful at the personal level, and I believe our experience is replicable: bring together teams with excellence, focus, hard work, courage, and luck. Luck begins with an opportunity.

Thus, I can only stress how important it is to nurture FET now more than ever so that it continues to attract the best minds – both young and old, well-known and unknown – and provides them the means to start new intellectual fires – the opportunity. There is a lot of potential in Europe and the future demands we fully develop it. Our future – the planet's feature – may well depend on it.

Excellence with a focus on ideas rather than curricula. Grand visions with concrete achievements. No fences. Positive impact. Bring it on.

* http://hive-eu.org, http://luminous-project.eu

Victor de Lorenzo,

07/05/2018 15:42

Innovative research always faces the dilemma between the exciting and the important. Ultimate success of great ideas often relies on our ability to convert Laboratory-scale operations into economically viable, full-fledged industrial-size counterparts. In the world od Metabolic Engineering and Synthetic Biology, instability of the live catalysts, consumption of large volumes of water and difficulties in downstream processing have deterred in many cases what would otherwise be a welcome transition in the methods of production. Is advanced Biotech thus bound to producing just small amounts of high added value molecules? To overcome the impasse in the times of the 4th Industrial Revolution various issues need to be met both at the Biological and the Industrial sides. Genomic and phenotypic stability of live catalysts is paramount for matching the efficiency of bioprocesses to those already existing in the purely chemical realm. This is not just a technical problem, but a fundamental scientific question that need to be addressed considering the bioreactor a new niche that needs to be formalized as such and being the subject of FET-type actions.

In reality, the challenge is not only biological, it applies also to the process engineering side. In contrast with the spectacular advances of recent years in genomic editing, basic fermentation methods remain largely the same since the times ancient Egyptians produced beer: an aqueous nutrient medium in a pot or barrel is inoculated with an active agent and let to evolve until the desired transformation occurs—or the pursued compounds(s) generated. Modern engineering has been able to control fermentations to an extraordinary degree and certainly extend bioreactor types towards much more sophisticated designs. But most industrial bioproduction still relies on vessels filled with a considerable volume of water-based, sterile media inoculated with a single monoculture of the adequate strain. Productivity is then measured in grams/liter! There is ample room for improving this state of affairs by getting ideas on how some natural systems do produce some compounds in large amounts. For instance, couldn’t we get inspiration from the awesome productivity of cows’ udders or rubber trees for designing a different type of bioreactors with very little water, sterile functioning and easy operation? What’s the engineering logic that makes these systems so efficient? There is much to learn from such optimally evolved biological reactors beyond just trying to adapt biological catalysts to already existing platforms. Production at the site of need or the point of care also ask for new concepts for generation of biomolecules in miniaturized, portable settings that will surely differ from what we have now.

Finally, modern Biotechnology has much to offer for overcoming the alienation between the global industrial metabolism and the big geobiochemical cycles of the Biosphere. Waste from unchecked industrial, agricultural and urban development has generated large amounts of greenhouse gases, non-degradable plastics, micropollutants, major unbalances of nitrogen and phosphorus and an unmanageable volume of lignocellulosic residues. The global environmental microbiome might become our main ally to ultimately reconnect such anthropogenic waste with the cycling of elements that operate the functioning of our planet. If a few chemical reactions (eg the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixation) were able to altogether change the ecology of our planet we may also explore ways of remediating our impact by deploying large-scale bio-based interventions aimed at restoring former environmental balances and creating new ones. This is of course not a mere academic experiment but a multi-tiered mission that involves many stakeholders and requires careful governance. Yet, in view of the phenomenal environmental challenges that the new generations will face, inaction and business-as-usual surely pose the highest risk. FET-type programs are the only ones in place that allow such out-of-the-box thinking and ensuing action!

Gianluca Baldassarre,

07/05/2018 10:21

Among the research funding initiatives of Europe, I think FETOPEN projects (RIA Research and innivation Action) are the best ones to foster true future breakthroughs as they are: open to all topics, open to the participation of all researchers ("big and small"), and having a simple structure and burocracy (e.g., vs. the Flagships). That's what you need in order to seed many different/divergent ideas and let the best ones grow. So, I welcome that Europe intends to further develop FETOPEN initiatives.

I think a key element of the FETOPEN scheme is interdisciplinarity. Suggestion. Foster an even stronger link between the sciences of the natural (e.g., physics/chemistry, biology, neuroscience) and the sciences of the artificial (e.g, mathematics, engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence). I expect that it is from there that the greatest breakthoughs will arrive.

A couple of last thoughts.

First. Don't let the presence of a flagship in a given area lead FETOPEN projects proposed in that area to be penalised in the evaluation. Motivation: a succesful flagship means that a critical field of research has been identiffied; thus, alonside the approaches deepened by the flagship, you need to cultivate many other deviant ideas and approaches since that field is critical. Solution: instruct evaluators to not evaluate FETOPEN projects with this prejudice in mind: "If there is already a flagship on this topic, covering all aspects of the topic, why this project? It cannot be enough innovative."

Second. Instruct evaluators to equate "scientific excellence" to "outstanding idea" and less to "outstanding researchers" (this is a natural bias). Indeed, the fastest and most secure way to become an outstanding researcher is to follow the current mainstream approach in the field. Funding projects on the mainstream front is good as they lead to go in depth along the most promising directions. But if you also seek truly breakthrough innovations, then you also need to give space to non-mainstream researchers and ideas.

Kobi Gal,

07/05/2018 00:06

I see disruptive technologies as helping us make better decisions, and improve our interactions in the world, by understanding what drives our behavior, and providing advice and guidance for achieving our goals. They can include motivational messages for peer production sites such as citizen science, machine generated feedback to guide students, and personlized web design. By integrating artificial intelligence with cognitive models of human behavior, such technologies can contribute to people's engagement and contributions without hindering their interactions.

Relevant paper here on increasing engagement in citizen science by personalizing motivational messages to users, funded by EU FET project

arianna menciassi,

05/05/2018 18:31

FET is essential to promote innovation. If industrial innovation is not nurtured by FET results, we cannot expect to concretely support innovation. For researchers saying that FET programs have been partially substituted by ERC programs, I answer that FET promotes collaborative research which is not promoted by ERC. And collaborative research can truly generate interdisciplinary innovation. In the past, there was also a NEST program (New Emerging Science and Technologies) which was cancelled after few years, but it was quite close to FET. The FET program is even more important now, being the only program to promote basic science and future technologies in a collaborative fashion. The FET Launchpad program should also be promoted for giving more credibility to FET results in terms of real exploitation.

Dario Mazzella,

03/05/2018 16:29

If we want to build a competitve EU we need to invest into Future Emerging Technologies.

Not only FET have the opportunity to research what could potentially disrupt the world in the future, but they can also fill the gap in that risky early stage where startups and SMEs have high chances to fail.

But that's not enough.

There is the need to push FET to solve concrete societal challenges, to impact the lives of millions, and to drive the market take-up of innovative solutions. If not we will be againg standing in a situation where EU is a leader in science, but keeps on failing in investing in innovation: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/the-state-of-research-and-innovation-in-europe-in-7-charts/

Lorenzo Moroni,

03/05/2018 16:24

FET is an essential prorgram for foundational research on very innovative ideas, which have the potential to foster our industries development and growth 7-10 years ahead the road. In fact, the program offers at the moment a too small chance for such radical change to be explored and should be reinforced with larger funding options (curent success rate below 2% is simply too low as there are a lot of disruptive ideas that do not make it to be tested for several reasons that are not of sufficient importance for rejection).
As a member of a newly funded FET-OPEN project, and with the experience of having being patient and perseverant in applying to this program, I encourage the EU to consider enlarging the scheme in the next research funding scheme if we want to bridge the competitive gap with USA and Asia where funding of disruptive and innovative research has been significantly increased in the past decade and resulted in a steep growth of new industries.

Riccardo Bernardini,

25/04/2018 15:33

FET? Just the bare minimum of what is needed...

Let me go back to more than 100 years ago...

At the end of '800 some physicist were trying to explain why the light of the sun had that specific composition, why hydrogen adsorbs radiation only at some frequency and why the photoelectric effect does not happen if the wavelength is too long. The result of this curiosity-driven investigation was quantum mechanics. Without it today we would not have lasers, NMR and I would not be writing this on an Internet forum sicne tehre would be no microelectronic. We would not have Facebook, Uber, Netflix, ... nor all that more or less useless "startuplets"

Question: could policy makers in '800 guess the future applications of quantum mechanics? Of course not. Not even in the most wildest dreams one could imagine Internet, NMR or lasers. If research at that time were "low-risk and impact oriented," maybe people would have worked on high-temperature steam engine (a high-temperature engine is more efficient) and now maybe we would valves suited for steam at 1000 degrees , but no Facebook.

Note also that the first high-impact applications of quantum mechanics came out maybe 50 years (two generations) after the birth of quantum mechanics.

Although industrial research has its place, there *must* be research that is high-risk and with no specific application in sight, you never know what the research on --- say --- dark matter will bring in a century. If we neglect this, we will just have lots of "startuplets" that propose services "like Uber, but for dogs' ingrow nails"...

Vasco PETRUZZI,

15/09/2019 23:35

Innovation in EUROPE, MUST be different from "innovative technologies" we are using at the moment...which are engeneered to continuously and limitlessly collect data in order to profile...DATA are the real value to protect because are a perfect image of who we are, what we love, and where are we going... ( above all in research... ) .Keep on investing in UN-loyal technology it's a big mistake and a big danger! Let's fly high and above all...out of the box! ...I underline this concept written on April 2018 with a simple sentence: Smart" technology+cloud = spying. It's time to became aware and responsible. EUROPE WAKE UP!

Jerzy J. Langer,

23/04/2018 14:15

"High-risk research" is normal, the only way to progress in science and technology. Traditionally, it simply is called "research". Any high-risk research (particularly interdisciplinary) should be supported in priority as a must to be able to get real progress in science and technology.

However, to be fully successful, we need to support fresh "risky" ideas outside the current funding system, which is time-consuming and highly inefficient in such a case.

Nikolay Atanasov,

22/04/2018 20:53

Congratulation to the FET-teem for the new FET program and interdisciplinary opportunities!

Digital thinking could be a great winner or great looser and today there is a few of seconds for it. Nevertheless, I believe in the dimensional growth of information digital unit and system as valuable digital truth and secret of Innovation and Socio-economical Future. Because of it is risk value even someone to understand the matter of risk and character of breakthrough novelties, digital personalization and digital economical and market identity.

I wish to all readers of this forum Health and New Luck.

Jane Hillston,

22/04/2018 20:01

Experience has shown that is very difficult to predict which research will turn out to be crucial for future advance, or when the advances that follow from research will come. Sometimes the benefits can be reaped within months, sometimes only after decades. But this lack of certainty makes it all the more important that there is funding for research that is not tied to immediate problems. The FET programme has been of enormous benefit in maintaining the health of the European science base and ensuring readiness for the challenges of the future. It is essential that such a funding stream be sustained if Europe is to retain competitive both in terms of its research and in terms of its industry.

Fausto Giunchiglia,

22/04/2018 10:17

My take is quite simple: what is the alternative?

There is a time for everything. No approach or solution is good for eveything or every time. So, the more general question is: what is the right approach to science and technology to day?

Are we living times when the future is clear, when we all know where we and society know where we are going? The answer to the question of this blog is a direct consequence of this, maybe more foundational, question.

My answer to the above question is quite simple. In the last decades we have produced more knowledge than in all the previous history of humanity. And this process is increasing in speed, mainly because of the convergence of IT and all the other disciplines. IT is becoming the discipline of knowledge, where knowledge should be taken in its broadest meaning, and this is having a huge impact on all disciplines, no matter whether they are humanistic, scientific of technology driven.

All the boundaries between disciplines is being blurried. The organization of knowledge had a good motivation in the need to organize the learning in the first Universities but it no longers fits the current needs of society. The world is far too complex to be studied in slices, as the current disciplines force us to do. We need end-to-end studies, research and solutions which will allow us to study the phenomena under consideration in their full complexity. And this is exactly where IT can produce the crucial help needed to deal with complexity. IT, together with all the other disciplines must evolve to allow us to reason at scale. We need to completely re-think how to organize knowledge and science, and make them more quantititative, more data driven, more evidence based, and based on much larger scale studies.

In the past, humans have been "protected" from the complexity of the world by their space and time limitations. People lived in "small worlds" with little knowledge of what is going on in the world as a whole. But globalization and the Internet have largely removed these limitations. And we are all dealing with amounts of data, information and knowledge that, simply put, we do not know how to handle.

The research we need to do should start, or at least have at the core, us, the people, humanity. What we are designing is the new society where our children will be living. A completely new society which will be very different form the onw where we grew up.

Can this research be low risk? Or be incremental on the current research? Of course not. All the low risk and/or incremental research will miss the issues above which, by definition, are high risk, given the impact they will have on humanity.

Davide Rocchesso,

19/04/2018 15:53

What the future will be like, nobody can tell. The brain drain from universities to big-data companies shows that the emergence of new technologies is increasingly market driven. Why should public money be spent for future and emerging technologies? Indeed, it would be wiser to direct public funding to future and emerging knowledge, even to those embryos of new knowledge that are apparently far from industrial exploitation and product innovation. Knowledge and understanding are at the roots of any progress in society, and are also the best defense against any form of tiranny. The Facebook-Analytica affair shows that new kinds of tiranny are just around the corner.

Joana SOUSA,

18/04/2018 23:02

Interdisciplinary is a crucial matter in research. The inputs of different perspectives and fields are very important to create value and to understand not only the real problem but also to find a path for solving it. Research is also associated with risk; however, the risk can be divided into several levels. High-risk research will bring the researchers and innovators with an opportunity to think deeper and to go beyond. Without this opportunity, the development of disruptive technologies will not be possible, and the creation of new markets will be compromised. On the other hand, high-risk research implies a budget which is not accessible for the most of institutions, companies, researchers or innovators. Most of the times, big companies/research centers are more able to bet on this than the other institutions, or sometimes if some other institutions present some high-risk idea to big companies, these big companies/research centers request a big fee to help. Thus, this situation is creating an unfair competition in the research market. EC should play an important role here in order to balance this situation and providing tools to help those who want to make a difference across the Europe and world. Disruptive solutions have the potential to create new markets, to gain the attention of new investors and, consequently, to boost not only the notoriety of European institutions but also European SMEs, implying great grow-up of Europe in terms of research and economy.

Juan Moreno,

18/04/2018 15:47

FET funding is a unique opportunity for high-risk, creative and pioneering approaches. As technology evolves rapidly, supporting unconventional research by multidisciplinary teams becomes more and more relevant to stimulate new ideas with potential high-impact.

Till Korten,

16/04/2018 12:46

In light of industry 4.0, particularly the change of the job market due to automation, it is crucial for Europe to stay competitive in future and emerging technologies. Emerging technologies offer the potential to create jobs in new areas, compensating for job loss due to automation. This is exactly where the FET programme comes in by funding high-risk research on disruptive technologies with emphasis on the lowest TRL levels. This kind of research will become particularly critical for the European economy and society in the upcoming decade.

Marco Nolinari,

12/04/2018 15:17

FET founding is a great idea and a much-needed resource for EU to keep up with innovation. Multidisciplinary and impact of course are the main key words. The main obstacle in a system in which resources for research are constantly reducing is the selection procedure. 25% of the projects delivering patents within three years seems to me a quite unsatisfactory result. A review process on previous call looking at results obtained by not founded ideas to single out proposal that have been successful in spite of the EU rejection might help to find pitfalls in the selection procedure.

Thomas Schmickl,

11/04/2018 10:11

I think that most challenges that we face (autonomous machines, AI, the future of labour, global change, societal change, invasive species, ecosystem change, land loss, diseases, molecular biology and medicine, furure of agriculture, ...) are all involving a deeper understanding of complex systems, often even several connected complex systems. Thus, research towards these challenges has to be inherently inter-disciplinary (trans-disciplinary) and high-risk, as innovation prediction (and thus also research plans) within complex environments is always very risky, naturally.

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