FORGING

Description:

Technological breakthroughs empowered by enabling technologies hold a transformation potential that can be funnelled to address industrial and societal grand challenges, like greening and digitalisation. To exploit this transformative potential, the innovation journey that leads new emerging technologies to their market uptake shall embed value-sensitive considerations, such as environmental and societal implications.

FORGING proposes a new methodology that breaks linear innovation trajectories to stimulate new technological visions and pathways attentive to the environment and society, and human-centred in alignment with Industry 5.0. technological frameworks. FORGING will create enabling frameworks to accelerate the pick-up of novel and responsible enabling technologies: through the development of six Technological Pathways, emerging enabling technologies will be positioned at their maturity levels, and their deployment and industry absorption will be promoted for positive societal impact.

The FORGING methodology catalyses its stakeholder community (link to get involved) with 600 active members, from academia to industry, to CSS, to policymakers and to the broader society. We aim to organise numerous co-creation sessions, consultations with policy bodies, scenario workshops and Tech. and Innovation campaigns to drive tech adoption.

The FORGING Playbook and Toolbox will gather a set of facilitation guidance and materials for the exploration, reflection, co-creation and evaluation of emerging technologies. Together with the FORGING community, these assets will sustain FORGING as a new flagship initiative on emerging enabling technologies.

During FORGING, researchers aim to develop six Technology Pathways, establish a community of 400 individuals and develop the FORGING Playbook and Toolbox. In the post-project consolidation, the FORGING community is expected to grow of more than 1000 members within a timeframe of 3 to 5 years.

Estimated impact:

The FORGING co-creation and structural collaboration framework for innovation through value-sensitive design (translated in the form of Playbook and Toolbox) is a key output for future innovation driven by emerging technologies and thereby contributing to European leadership in academia and industry.

FORGING approach will foster a step-change in breakthrough innovation in Europe and will start by capturing impactful results within predefined technological frameworks through a carefully designed procedure, combining technology exploration design research and human values, including expert consultation and intelligence analysis.

Beyond the project implementation and with a long-term perspective, FORGING will contribute to the following wider impacts:

• Europe’s open strategic autonomy by sustaining first-mover advantages in strategic areas, including AI, data, robotics, quantum computing, and graphene, and by investing early in emerging enabling technologies.
• Reinforced European industry leadership across the digital supply chain.
• Robust European industrial and technology presence in all key parts of a greener digital supply chain, from low-power components to advanced systems, future networks, new data technologies and platforms.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.