This policy brief synthesises the outcomes of all ten thematic foresight pilot workshops of the Eye of Europe project (2024–2026), which engaged more than 400 policymakers, researchers, entrepreneurs, citizens and foresight practitioners in Berlin, Bucharest, Madrid, Paris, Prague and Thessaloniki. Building on R&I Policy Brief No. 1, it draws a cross-cutting narrative from the full series. Asked how they perceived the future, participants most often described it as a roller coaster. The brief argues that the underlying problem is not speed as such but a loss of control over direction, and it calls for stepping off the roller coaster through collective transformation towards regenerative futures.
The brief identifies four focal areas for policy action: society, from individual wellness to collective wellbeing; fashion, from ultra-fast fashion to regenerative and immaterial value and identity; food, from efficiency and optimisation to regeneration and resilience; and governance, from reactive firefighting to anticipatory governance. For each area, it traces the shift from accelerated to regenerative paradigms, presents alternative strategies that emerged from the workshops, and sets out R&I policy implications at EU, Member State and regional levels.
Four cross-cutting implications follow for how Europe organises research and innovation:
- rewarding systemic and interdisciplinary research;
- treating citizen and stakeholder knowledge as a research input in its own right;
- nurturing imagination and transformative ambition;
- and recognising foresight as a European public good, a permanent capacity of ERA governance rather than a project-by-project activity.
Investment should extend beyond technology to social, institutional and governance innovation, and be aligned vertically across EU, national and regional levels as well as horizontally across policy domains.
