RIBRI – Radical Innovation Breakthrough Inquirer
Horizon scanning for radical innovation breakthroughs
The Radical Innovation Breakthrough Inquirer (RIBRI) report identified 100 potential innovation breakthroughs in fields such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics or biomedicine, and indicates how the EU can prepare for them. The project team developed a semi-automated process to search for radical innovations and applied this at EU level for the first time.
The 100 Radical Innovation Breakthroughs (RIBs) include technical developments, for example biodegradable sensors and 4D printing, as well as societal concepts such as basic income or car-free cities. Make your own analysis here.
An innovative, semi-automated process was used to identify and analyze the RIBs. A learning language-analysis algorithm (NLP Natural Language Processing) analyzed the contents of around 500 000 news items on scientific and technical platforms. Topics were filtered out that appeared for the first time during the period of investigation. These topics and any related patents and publications were evaluated by scientists from the respective field. The evaluation was carried out in relation to the degree of maturity, the probability of widespread use in 20 years time and Europe’s position.