What is ATTRACT?

Sergio Bertolucci, chair of ATTRACT’s Independent  Scientific Committee and former research director at CERN, explains the project and its role as a bridge between science and the economy.

Q. What is ATTRACT?

ATTRACT is a consortium of major labs and universities working with industry to stimulate more innovation in Europe. We start with the technology our labs pioneer every day: sensors, detectors, imaging software, networking systems - all prerequisites for our breakthrough scientific work. But they are also, potentially, useful for industry, the economy and society at large. The challenge: How to connect this technical know-how with private capital and enterprise. That’s the purpose of ATTRACT.

Q. Why ATTRACT?

ATTRACT seeks to connect the power of open science to the know-how of industry, transferring scientific innovations to the general public more efficiently than Europe is doing right now. At its core, ATTRACT is about creating an ecosystem where ideas multiply. At the moment, we are missing this—an ecosystem—in Europe. We want there to be greater sharing of information among scientists and between scientists and industry.

Q. You have said ATTRACT is like a bridge. In what way?

ATTRACT aims to connect suppliers of technology (scientists) with buyers of technology (business). By doing so, we hope to foster a mentality of co-innovation. We hope to create a repository of skills and innovation that ‘bridges’ the current gap between scientists’ discoveries and industry's needs. Most of the things we scientists develop could have a large impact on society, but they can only have an impact if we can find companies to fund and manufacture them. As our project develops, we hope that trust develops between scientists and industry, and that this trust allows our project to continue to grow.

Q. So you imagine some sort of positive feedback loop between industry and scientists?

Yes. Precisely. More money from industry, more forward-looking research from scientists, more profits for industry, more money for research. To catalyse this loop and get it going, though, we need money from the EU. We have already formed a consortium of business, scientists, investors. These are our ‘flowers.’ We simply need financial support from the EU to water them and let them blossom.

Q. What does a successful outcome for ATTRACT look like?

ATTRACT can generate several thousand jobs, increase industry’s appetite for risk, employ Europe’s talented tech-savvy youth, and ultimately get ideas to market faster, benefiting all of European society. These are our near term goals. Our long terms goals are much more ambitious: to generate more than €7 billion and hundreds of thousands of new jobs by creating and allowing a European tech industry to truly flourish. These are intimidating numbers, but I’m confident and hopeful.