Project argues in favour of greater support to FET Open and FET Proactive actions
The three branches of the FET programme(opens in new window) have been very active over the past few years. Whilst the spotlight is most often placed on the Human Brain and Graphene flagships, the perhaps more discrete FET Open and FET Proactive actions gave birth to a head-spinning number of projects. FET_TRACES, which ran from July 2015 to November 2017, took a look at as many as 224 of them. FET_TRACES asked two simple yet crucial questions: How good is the FET programme, and did it achieve the goals it had initially formulated. “We measured impacts according to the FET mission, which is to support excellent, novel, interdisciplinary research and research which is building innovation eco-systems around knowledge-intensive technologies,” says Dr Bernd Beckert, who coordinated the project on behalf of Fraunhofer. To do that, the project team used a set of different methods including portfolio-analysis, bibliometrics, online surveys, interviews and case studies. They looked at every single one of the 224 projects with hindsight, went through all the literature they produced, categorised them according to various criteria and drew conclusions on their actual impact. Asked about the project’s most important findings, Dr Beckert first underlines how the FET programme’s vocation is to support what is commonly called ‘use-inspired basic research’. “We knew that, from a scientific point of view, this kind of research is becoming more and more important, leading to technological leadership and all kinds of economic effects. But what really surprised us is how the FET programme was able to put it into practice. The usual tension between basic and applied research was successfully overcome by some FET projects and, looking at the programme as a whole, we found that these gaps were very effectively bridged. There were highly relevant impacts of FET open and FET Proactive projects in academia, along with high numbers of patent applications and spin-offs,” he says. The project was also a unique opportunity to gather first-hand feedback from FET researchers. According to Dr Beckert, there was a consensus around the uniqueness of the programme. FET actually gives researchers the freedom to try out new things and experiment with different approaches, as opposed to other national and European research funding programmes that are more formalised. “Within FET, researchers can pursue unexpected developments when they occur. Moreover, since the programme encourages researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds to work together, it contributes to building new scientific communities. The researchers we asked about their experience within FET told us that neither national programmes, nor support to the principal investigators alone like ERC does, can achieve this,” Dr Beckert explains. Another important outcome of FET_TRACES is the identification of “success factors” for the FET projects which have had the most impact. These include teaming up with the best researchers in the field, pursuing a new approach in the context of a research field which is considered as “hot” in the community and combine it with something new, as well as combining a wide range of different disciplines. So does it mean that FET actions should benefit from more attention in the future? Dr Beckert believes so. “The FET approach is widely considered as highly attractive and unique. However, if you look at the broader funding landscape of the EU, FET Open and FET Proactive still belong to the smaller programmes. Now that we have demonstrated how they deliver all kinds of positive impacts, we hope that decision makers will decide on a budget increase for FET and that the programme will be strengthened in the future to become a major pillar in the funding landscape of the EU.”