The visionary aspects and exploratory characteristics of FET might make it sound like a kind of magic, but the mission of FET is actually very concrete: to turn Europe's excellent science base into a competitive advantage.

FET actions are expected to initiate radically new lines of technology through unexplored collaborations between advanced multidisciplinary science and cutting-edge engineering. It will help Europe grasp leadership early on in those promising future technology areas able to renew the basis for future European competitiveness and growth, and that can make a difference for society in the decades to come.

Under Horizon 2020, FET actions have been allocated a provisional budget of 2 696 million euro.

The FET programme has three complementary lines of action to address different methodologies and scales, from new ideas to long-term challenges:

• FET Open supports early-stage joint science and technology research around new ideas for radically new future technologies. It will explore a wide range of new technological possibilities, inspired by cutting-edge science, unconventional collaborations or new research and innovation practices. It represents 40% of the overall FET budget.
   
• FET Proactive nurtures emerging themes and structure communities by addressing a number of promising exploratory research themes. The main benefits of this structuring yet exploratory approach are emerging novel areas that are not yet ready for inclusion in idnsutry research roadmaps, and building up and structuring of new interdisciplinary research communities around them. The present work programme supports emerging themes and communities in:
  • 'Global Systems Science' (GSS), to help integrate the abundance of data on social, economic, financial, technological, and ecological systems available today and elaborate societal responses across policy domains and cross-cutting authorities
  • 'Knowing, doing and being: cognition beyond problem solving', to establish new foundations for future robotics and other artificial cognitive systems with clear progress beyond current capabilities and design concepts
  • 'Quantum simulation', to contribute to solving problems in fundamental and applied science using new tools based on quantum physics and quantum technologies
  • 'Towards exascale high-performance computing', to deliver a broad spectrum of extreme scale HPC systems and to develop a sustainable European HPC Ecosystem
     
• FET Flagships support ambitious, large-scale, long-term, science-driven, goal-oriented, roadmap-based research initiatives tackling grand challenges in S&T. They are expected to provide transformational impact on science, technology and society, lead to novel innovation clusters in Europe and facilitate alignment of national and regional research efforts. FET Flagships require a long-term commitment of all key stakeholders sharing a common scientific vision and a joint effort of EU and national programmes to provide a large shared financial support. FET will provide the main EU support in H2020 of the two FET flagships already chosen under FP7: 'Graphene' and 'Human Brain Project' (HBP).