Towards Quantum Technology Flagship - Main contents

The Dutch presidency has well prepared our next steps for developing our EU Quantum Technology Flagship. With the newly created High Level Steering Group, the process now gets the right impetus.

Back in May, during the "Quantum Europe: a New Era of Technology" event hosted by the Dutch Presidency and organised with the support of the European Commission, the Commission’s proposal to launch an ambitious 1 B€ flagship on Quantum Technologies has been announced.

During the same event, we received the Quantum Manifesto endorsed by more than 3400 leaders and experts from academia, industry and governmental/funding institutions. It showed the community’s strong support tolaunch such an ambitious European initiative in quantum technologies.

Recently, the Competitiveness Council conclusions on the "Digital Single Market Technologies and Public Services Modernisation" package opened the way for the preparation of this flagship initiative in close cooperation with the Member States and with the relevant industrial and academic stakeholders.

As announced, the European Commission started the work of setting-up an independent High Level Steering Committee to drive the preparatory phase.

We are pleased to announce that this High Level Steering Committee will be chaired by Professor Jürgen Mlynek.

The High Level Steering Committee will be established as a high level expert group with a mandate of one year. The members will be selected to best represent collectively the diversity of stakeholders in Europe. We will announce the composition of the expert group in the coming weeks once the selection procedure is completed.

The group will work in an open and transparent way andtogether with the wider community of stakeholders from academia and industry and in close collaboration with Member States, it will propose a Strategic Research Agendawith clear and ambitious goals, as well as an efficient approach to its implementation and governance.

An intermediate report highlighting the overall approach for the flagship and the detailed priority areas for the flagship ramp-up phase will be delivered by the end of 2016. It will serve as input to the preparation of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2018-2020. We expect a final report addressing all aspects of the future flagship to be presented in one year time.

We thank Professor Jürgen Mlynek for accepting to chair this Committee. His experience and leadership will be very usefulin taking this initiative forward and we wish him the best in preparing this important endeavour for Europe.

Dutch Minister Henk Kamp and Commissioner Guenther H. Oettinger