The third Mutual Learning Event (MLE) of project Eye of Europe took place online on January 21st, 2025. As a Coordination and Support Action, project Eye of Europe aims to enhance the integration of foresight practices into the Research and Innovation (R&I) policy-making across Europe and to nurture a vibrant, cohesive R&I foresight community that contributes significantly, as a collective intelligence, to shaping and guiding policy decisions.

Over forty participants from diverse stakeholder groups joined the event: Eye of Europe partner organizations, representatives from the European Commission, R&I funding agencies, representatives of governmental bodies. Expert presentations of two European and one national foresight exercises showcased diverse practices for integrating foresight results into the R&I policy cycle and formed the basis for vivid discussions in three interactive sessions.

Presentations:

• Project coordinator Radu Gheorghiu (UEFISCDI, Romania) introduced the Eye of Europe project as a social infrastructure supporting the strenghtening of the European foresight community. To this end, Eye of Europe hosts a series of activities: five mutual learning events, eleven pilot foresight activities and two conferences - highlighting the upcoming Futures4Europe conference to be held in Vienna on May 15-16, 2025. Moreover, the project enabled the upgrade of the platform futures4europe.eu to better serve its role as the online home of a vibrant and inclusive European foresight community. Multiple new improvements of the platform were shared in the closing section of the event.
• Moderator of the event Lenka Hebáková (TC Prague, Czech Republic) followed up with an introduction on the event´s aims and agenda.
• Nikos Kastrinos (former EC) shared about the Foresight on Demand project "Foresight towards the Second Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe”, providing insights into how foresight was employed and linked with the policy cycle in the period of HE strategies setting.
• “Megatrends 2050 in a Changing World and their Impact on Portugal” presented by Monica Isfan (PlanAPP, Portugal) showcased Portugal's experience with embedding foresight in the context of strategic planning.
• Klaus Kubeczko (AIT, Austria) and Jürgen Wengel (former EC) shared about the Foresight on Demand project “S&T&I 2050: Science, technology and innovation for ecosystem performance : accelerating sustainability transitions“ on mapping the relationship between emerging trends in science, technology and innovation and ecosystem performance in the context of the European Green Deal. Moreover, the presentation highlighted the project's engagement of a wide range of STI experts in a Dynamic Argumentative Delphi survey.

This event is the third in a series of five MLEs planned in the project; the following event will be held beginning April 2025 in Budapest. All Eye of Europe MLEs are organized by Technology Centre Prague (TC), Eye of Europe partner and key Czech national think tank and academia based NGO with a rich experience with knowledge-based policy making support and (participatory as well as expert based) foresight activities.

Results for the working group Materials are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-materials.html 

Article "STEM materials: a new frontier for an intelligent sustainable world" by Pier Francesco Moretti is available at https://bmcmaterials.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42833-019-0004-4 

Results for the working group Energy are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-energy.html 

The second Mutual Learning Event (MLE) took place online on September 26, 2024, as part of Eye of Europe, a Horizon Europe project  which aims to enhance the integration of foresight practices into Research and Innovation (R&I) policy-making across Europe and to nurture a vibrant, cohesive R&I foresight community that contributes significantly, as a collective intelligence, to shaping and guiding policy decisions.

The online MLE brought together fifty participants from diverse stakeholder groups: Eye of Europe partner organizations, the European Commission, R&I funding agencies, representatives of governmental bodies. The event, organized by Technology Centre Prague (TC), focused on the topic of policy oriented communication of foresight results. Group and plenary discussions in three interactive sessions were framed by expert presentations showcasing diverse practices in the application and communication of foresight.

Presentations:

• Michal Pazour (TC Prague, Czech Republic) introduced the Eye of Europe project and the context of this second Mutual Learning Event.
• Moderator of the event Lenka Hebáková (TC Prague, Czech Republic) followed up with an introduction to the event’s aims and agenda.
• Mikko Dufva (SITRA, Finland) – “Communicating foresight. From knowing it all to empowering change”. The presentation included three case studies: SITRA’s decade long experience with megatrends as a platform for dialogue, their work on weak signals as an invitation to broaden futures thinking in a “what if?” spirit and, finally, their efforts to empower others to define futures bottom-up, through small funding to diverse teams across Finland.
• “Communicating foresight in the European Commission” presented by Maia Knutti and Teodora Garbovan (EU Policy Lab, European Commission) brought insights into how, in the European Commission context, foresight is employed and linked with the policy cycle. Examples covered foresight content (e.g. Strategic Foresight Reports) and engagement tools (e.g. megatrends hub, scenario exploration system) that are serving different stakeholder groups across multiple channels.
• Bianca Dragomir (Institutul de Prospectiva, Romania) discussed a case study on embedding foresight into policy making in the context of developing the Strategy for Fishing and Aquaculture 2035 in Romania. Moreover, she shared about embedding foresight into both policy making and societal conversation, discussing two Foresight on Demand projects: Scenarios on “Transhumanist Revolutions” and foresight-meets-speculative-design project “Futures Garden”.
• Totti Könnölä (Insight Foresight Institute, Spain) shared about the Foresight on Demand project "European R&I foresight and public engagement for Horizon Europe" that advanced several objectives: generating foresight intelligence, i.e. through forward-looking policy briefs; monitoring of foresight activities and providing support for exploitation (Horizon Futures Watch); laying the building blocks for a European foresight community supported by an online platform. 
• Marie Ségur (Futuribles, France) presented a case study on “Future of social work in France to 2035-2050” and the methods employed throughout the process: using surveys to motivate engagement with futures thinking, scenario building that may inform strategic choices and guide towards a vision and, finally, communicating outcomes in a synthetic manner, that may contribute to a wider discussion around the topic.
• Eye of Europe project coordinator Radu Gheorghiu (UEFISCDI, Romania) shared previews of the upcoming upgrade of the futures4europe.eu platform, with its new look and extended features.
  
  This event is the second in a series of five MLEs planned in the project; the following event will be held on January 21st 2025 also in an online format. All Eye of Europe MLEs are organized by Technology Centre Prague (TC), Eye of Europe partner and key Czech national think tank and academia based NGO with a rich experience with knowledge-based policy making support and (participatory as well as expert based) foresight activities.

The Eye of Europe (EoE) project has reached an important milestone: Using an interactive approach, the members of the consortium came up with eleven exciting topics that will be addressed in Foresight Workshops with experts, citizens, entrepreneurs, scientists, policymakers, journalists and many other stakeholder groups within the coming 16 months. In the workshops, Eye of Europe partners will apply both established and novel Foresight approaches to dive deep into topics of common interest to stakeholders across the European Research Area. These workshops will take place in cities such as Madrid, Prague, Berlin, Bucharest, Paris and Thessaloniki, as well as online.

The final set of topics for EoE pilot workshops is as follows:

• Democracy – a long term Project: This online workshop will gather domain experts to shed light on a large spectrum of future challenges to democracy.
• The Knowledge of our Civilisation(s) in 2040: In this two-day Berlin based workshop participants with diverse domain expertise will explore the future of knowledge in human civilisation in the face of multiple drivers of change.
• European Industrial Decarbonisation: This two-day workshop in Madrid will gather diverse stakeholders to debate alternative pathways of industrial decarbonisation for Europe in the face of different geopolitical scenarios.
• Emotion Ecosystems: This Bucharest based two-day workshop will investigate the impact of technologies like affective computing and brain-machine interface on individuals and collectives with different stakeholder groups.
• Democracy and Technology: In this workshop citizens in Prague will jointly reflect on democratic approaches to risks connected with new technologies and their impacts on various societal groups.
• Aging and Assisted Living Technologies: This workshop in Berlin with international research and policy actors is dedicated to future ways of integrating smart and digital technologies into assisted living and care for older adults.
• Fashion Futures: In two Thessaloniki based workshops citizens and domain experts will explore the future of sustainable fashion in interaction with values and identities both with a regional and international perspective.
• Public Policy and Change of Diets: In this workshop in Paris a diverse group of citizens will reflect on policy inroads into future pathways towards healthy and sustainable diets.
• Science and Conflicts: In this online workshop, experts and actors of the science system will jointly dive into possible implications of growing geopolitical tensions for science.
• Future of Knowledge and Emotions: This futures survey will provide input for the two interrelated topics the future of knowledge and the future of emotion ecosystems that will feed the respective workshops.
  
  
  These Eye of Europe Foresight pilot workshops have a twofold purpose.
  
  First of all, the workshops serve the project’s aspirations expressed by Eye of Europe coordinator, Radu Gheorghiu, namely to nurture the “vibrant community of individuals engaging in a conversation about our collective future” and to fuel the “continuous loop of dialogue, learning and inspiration”.
  
  Secondly, by addressing topics of common interest to R&I actors across ERA and major R&I challenges, they aim to mobilise collective anticipatory intelligence. In particular, we hope to shed light on the evolution of research and innovation and its contribution to a wide range of important future questions.
  
  How did the team arrive at these topics?
  
  The topic generation process involved three major elements:
  
• Analysis of R&I strategy documents from a range of different EU countries
• interviews with R&I actors from different positions in ERA’s research and innovation ecosystem,
• and interactive discourse among EoE partner organisations.
  
  It was important to the topic identification team, led by Pier Francesco Moretti from CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Italy, not to remain at the surface of the challenges that are expressed in key documents but to dive deeper into underlying root causes and dynamics. So when in the document analysis, topics like energy, artificial intelligence, digitalisation, health and security emerged at top positions, we strived to identify crosscutting underlying aspects.

As a Coordination and Support Action, project “Eye of Europe” aims to enhance the integration of foresight practices into Research and Innovation (R&I) policy making across Europe. Ultimately, the project envisions a more cohesive and influential R&I foresight community that contributes significantly, as a collective intelligence, to shaping and guiding policy decisions.

To this end, Eye of Europe builds on existing initiatives and experiences to foster knowledge-sharing between foresight practitioners and policy makers, attract domain experts in foresight endeavours, and engage a broader audience in futures thinking. Nurturing futures4europe.eu as the online home for the community and running various face-to-face events with different stakeholders will underpin these ambitions.
Methodologically, the project relies on the following building blocks:

• futures4europe.eu as the online hub for the R&I foresight community in Europe: The platform accommodates the interests of various stakeholders such as foresight experts, beneficiaries, domain experts, and an active audience. It operates on multiple integration levels, from mapping organizations and experts to sharing foresight results and capabilities. Moreover, it acts as the communication gateway for ongoing foresight activities, events, educational and inspirational materials.
  
  
• Sharing of practices: This entails mapping institutions engaged in R&I foresight activities, promoting mutual learning through interactive formats, developing shared visions for the future of foresight in R&I policy within the European Research Area (ERA), fostering exchanges among the foresight in R&I policy community through conferences, encouraging dialogues between futurist/expert communities, academics and policy practitioners.
  Key figures: 5 mutual learning events (MLE): 2 online, 3 face-to-face events; 1 vision building event for the Future of R&I Foresight in ERA; 2 conferences
  
  
• Running foresight pilots: Conducting a series of pilot workshops and online consultations with diverse formats, methodologies, and participants. This involves identifying topics of common interest within the European Research Area (ERA), where foresight perspectives offer added value, designing and implementing tailored pilot foresight activities involving various stakeholders, harnessing lessons learnt and feeding them into the platform and other dissemination channels.
  Key figures: 11 Foresight pilot processes: 3 exclusively with citizens, 4 mainly with experts and researchers tackling specific R&I topics, 4 involving a bespoke group of participants. Out of the 11 events, 8 will be face-to-face events, and 3 pilots will take place online
  
  
• Boosting futures literacy: The project encourages meaningful engagement with diverse audiences, from foresight professionals, researchers, policy-makers to various futures sensitive profiles (e.g. entrepreneurs, journalists, artists) and the wider civil society. The project will provide guides, methodology toolboxes, and training modules for R&I foresight and futures literacy, incorporating written and multimedia content.
  Key figures: 5-10 short training sets for participants in foresight exercises; 1 training module for foresight beneficiaries; 1 foresight training for early career researchers, 1 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on R&I foresight; 12 conversational podcasts; 6-8 Short videos and/or animated materials showcasing foresight processes and outcomes
  
  
• Fueling the public discourse around futures: Promoting the project and fostering the foresight community via the online platform futures4europe.eu and complementary channels such as social media and a dedicated newsletter. In addition to highlighting the project's own initiatives, Eye of Europe will also aim to promote foresight content developed in other projects, showcasing a diverse range of perspectives and insights within the foresight field. The quarterly newsletter will feature various content types like interviews, project updates, and foresight-related articles. Social media, particularly Futures4Europe's LinkedIn page, will be used to engage professional communities and wider audiences, with a focus on sharing project activities and fostering discussions.