Cover: Foresight Services to support strategic programming within Horizon 2020

Foresight Services to support strategic programming within Horizon 2020

Foresight report (D3)

by Helen Rebecca Schindler, Salil Gunashekar, Jonathan Cave, Jamal Shahin, Alun Rhydderch, Benjamin Cave, Catherine A. Lichten, Nicole van der Meulen, Veronika Horvath, Sonia Sousa, et al.

This report is an investigation into the scope for development and optimisation of policy interventions centred around the Horizon 2020 Programme (hereafter H2020), along ten thematic lines suggested by a recent crowdsourcing exercise. The study was conducted between June and September 2014. It was undertaken from a foresight perspective and seeks to explore links between long-term, forward-looking approaches and funding priorities. Chapter 1 presents the objectives and summarises the methods of the report; Chapter 2 describes the themes and analyses the nature and implications of their trend development; Chapter 3 presents a SWOT analysis oriented to clustering the themes and designed to expose what might usefully be done to improve knowledge and its application based on the current situation; Chapter 4 tackles the uncertainties of the environment in which thematic development and policy intervention will work by means of scenario analysis to identify critical dependencies; Chapter 5 concludes by integrating the results from the Report as a whole and making suggestions as to how the framework constructed in this report can be consistently reused. This report is based on: a trend analysis of significant current and emergent developments along these themes; a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis from the perspective of European innovation system stakeholders in the context of societal grand challenges; and scenario development taking into account the critical uncertainties and policy implications associated with these themes leading to 'meta-scenarios' showing how the themes will interact into the future.

Please note: This report is not available on the RAND website but can be downloaded from the European Union website.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter One

    Introduction

  • Chapter Two

    Themes and Trends

  • Chapter Three

    SWOT

  • Chapter Four

    Scenarios

  • Chapter Five

    Conclusion

  • Chapter Six

    References

  • Appendix A

    Methodology

Research conducted by

The research described in this report was prepared for the European Commission Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology (DG CONNECT) and conducted by RAND Europe.

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