ETEPS’ monitoring activities focus on policy-relevant trends and impact indicators, thereby serving to constitute a repository of experience and information for all other ETEPS tasks and activities. It is also an opportunity to develop interactions and knowledge sharing among ETEPS partners.

The ultimate goal of this activity is to serve clients and ETEPS with an efficient approach to systematically identify and assess relevant future trends in terms of their potential impact. This comprises the analysis of technological and socio-economic developments and their implications for European policy. It leads to the identification of new subjects that will potentially influence the political agendas, and a priority ranking of the most important ones.

Monitoring of these developments and the implications derived from it will provide a thought-provoking input to the policy debates in a wide spectrum of European policy areas: RTD policy, innovation and enterprise policy, competition policy, environmental policy, transport policy, energy policy, IST policy, agriculture policy, etc.

The activity is structured in a way to produce a sound and useful ETEPS network ‘knowledge-base’. The emphasis is on identifying trends and impact indicators. Through an assessment and ranking of such identified trends and indicators against pre-defined criteria, the activity contributes strategically to the mission and work programme of our clients and, through it, to the European Union policies. The activity thereby provides strategic policy information and a tool for policy intelligence.

Specifically, monitoring activities fulfil three main functions:

• They serve as a source for identifying new themes for studies;
• They deliver background information that can be used in forward-looking studies;
• They serve as a stand-alone activity to highlight important emerging developments.

Browse all monitoring projects.