On May 17, 2016, at the Quantum Europe 2016 conference held at QuTech in Delft, the Netherlands, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Günther Oettinger endorsed the Quantum Manifesto and announced the European Commission’s plan to invest €1 billion in a new Quantum Technologies Flagship initiative. The conference was organized by the Dutch government, in cooperation with the European Commission and QuTech, during the Netherlands’ Presidency of the Council of the EU.
The Quantum Manifesto, titled “A New Era of Technology,” was drafted by the European quantum community and endorsed by more than 3,400 individuals from academia and industry. It called upon Member States and the European Commission to launch a flagship-scale initiative combining education, science, engineering, and entrepreneurship to ensure Europe’s leading role in the emerging second quantum revolution.
Commissioner Oettinger stated that the Commission aimed to “launch an ambitious large-scale flagship initiative to unlock the full potential of quantum technologies, accelerate its development and bring commercial products to the consumer marketplace.” Dutch Minister for Economic Affairs Henk Kamp co-opened the event, noting the presence of industrialists from Intel, ASML, Bosch, and Microsoft.
The European Commission subsequently appointed a High-Level Steering Committee, composed of 12 academic members and 12 industry members, to deliver a strategic research agenda, an implementation model, and a governance structure for the Quantum Technologies Flagship. The committee’s intermediate report was delivered at a conference in Malta in February 2017, with the first Flagship projects scheduled to begin in 2018.