Moonshots
for Europe
For the past decades, Europe has been
a leader in innovation, deep tech and many
cross-border research projects, supported
by centres of academic excellence and a
vibrant start-up culture
By Harald Neidhardt, CEO & Curator, Futur/io Institute
I
strongly believe that Europe is
underselling its achievements, deserves
more credit for ground-breaking research
and must actively create a third way to be
an active part of shaping our future society
for the generations to come.
Europe is home to inventions like the
MP3 music format; the WWW, created at
CERN; Graphene, the ground-breaking
next material for faster chips and nano-
tech functionality unseen before; CRISPR/
Cas9, the gene editing tool with roots in
Spain, The Netherlands and Austria; artifcial
intelligence breakthroughs including
AlphaGo by the team at DeepMind, London
– now owned by Google – that outsmarted
the best Go player; Green-Tech and Fin-
Tech pioneers; Nobel laureates and
ambitious young high potentials
that start to clean the ocean before
they turn 20.
Yet, on a global scale, there is
much room to grow in recognition
of the pioneers. Through
fnancing to scale, by
educating a new
leadership of
generation Z, and
by promoting
visionary leaders
shaping a
new narrative, to help us co-create a new
Europe: a third way forward, in between
‘Make-America-great-again’ and a Chinese
superpower with a 300-year plan: We need
Moonshots for Europe.
We all experience the urgency of
challenges we are facing today – from
climate change to politics, from exponential
technologies to ethics in AI. The incoming
Anthropocene is clawing into our daily
lives and already overtaking our real-time
newsfeeds. It seems hard to switch of the
noise of man-made bad news to fnd the
signals of hope and lights at the end of a
tunnel of narrow-mindedness to the left
and far–right. But look beyond the surface
and you will fnd it: the good news, the
progress and the opportunities that
are left to bring actionable steps to
create a better tomorrow.
On a few golden October days
– just a few weeks ago – about
100 leaders representing corporate
innovation, academia, politics,
culture, research and start-
ups convened at H-Farm,
the Medici House of the
21st century, just outside
Venice, Italy. During the
Futur/io CxO executive
programme, a small spark
was created to cross-pollinate European
ideals, to value our open society, co-create
Moonshots for Europe and enjoy the
hospitality of a place ft for digital
pioneers, embedded in tradition and
beautiful countryside.
We learned, that we can think bigger,
bolder and positively about the future. We
learned how we can collaborate with diverse
backgrounds, beneft from diversity, co-create
a framework to apply moonshot thinking. We
discovered a way to carry home a fame of
appreciation and almost utopian excitement
to our teams, cities, countries or better
yet, our corner of an amazing European
continent. We appreciated that a small group
Harald Neidhardt by Dan Taylor