Photonics technologies, in the form of sensors, optical fibres, special lenses, LEDs, photonic integrated circuits and quantum technology amongst many others, will be used to launch all sorts of new and better products and processes in wide-ranging end-user applications of major societal benefit.
Europe is a global leader in disruptive photonics research, and home to many of the world’s most advanced photonics research institutes and photonics technology platforms. This excellent research base has enabled Europe to establish a strong position in the global photonics market. The critical challenge for Europe is to ensure that it extracts the maximum societal and economic benefits from the hundreds of millions of euros invested to date in fundamental research in photonics, and in the wonderfully strong base of advanced photonics technologies within Europe’s top research institutes.
ACTPHAST4R was established to address this challenge and opportunity for Europe. ACTPHAST4R provided wonderful new opportunities to bridge the gap between fundamental research (TRL1-2) and applied research and innovation (TRL4-5) with the key objectives of both strengthening the European innovation ecosystem and realising improved cross-fertilisation between photonics and other key-enabling technologies. As such, ACTPHAST4R was an ambitious project which aimed for the first time in Europe to open up access to a pan-European innovation support model for European researchers seeking to deploy cutting-edge photonics technologies for the purpose of developing demonstrators for wide-ranging scientific breakthrough concepts.
In fulfilling its mission, ACTPHAST4R overcame significant barriers, in particular the status quo of the traditional “siloed” approach to scientific valorisation taken by European research institutions, as well as the Covid pandemic which severely disrupted the project’s activities, in order to finally deliver strong results and impact. Overall, ACTPHAST4R provided a successful demonstration of the innovation support model for researchers in the domain of photonics which has been disseminated widely across the European regions and has been taken up in the development of the next generation Photonics Innovation Factory for Europe in the framework of Horizon Europe.
