CCAM Multicluster meeting: Strategic reflection about the future

On 9 October, more than 100 members of the CCAM Association gathered in Brussels for an internal CCAM Multicluster meeting.

The CCAM Association has been driving collaborative research and innovation within the Horizon Europe CCAM Partnership. With an extensive portfolio of projects now underway, it is crucial to step back and evaluate these initiatives from a system-level perspective to understand the broader impact and identify critical gaps in the research landscape.

This Multicluster meeting provides members with the opportunity to reflect on progress and help shape the direction of future work, including potential priorities for the next Framework Programme (FP10).

During today’s CCAM Association internal meeting in Brussels, members had an opportunity in the breakouts to start defining their priorities for the next EU Framework Programme (FP10: 2028-2035). Some of them fit into the picture of the potential new Automotive Partnership, and some do not necessarily, but are equally important for the CCAM stakeholders.

On the technology level, the strong focus will be on trustworthy AI (perhaps EU certified), but also on paramount safety and the whole vehicle sustainable system. We might need a master plan, but with agility and speed. We need to find a way of integrating startups into our community.

To go into the deployment of CCAM, we also need to consider resilience and business models that lead to market uptake. Smarter investments, also in project spin-offs, might be a good idea.

Value-driven competitiveness should be our way forward. However, to be faster, revolution might be necessary instead of progressive evolution.

What we are doing together in the CCAM Partnership is a marathon – said Andrea de Candido from EC DG RTD in his closing remarks at today’s CCAM Association Multicluster meeting. We shouldn’t forget the kilometres already behind us – we should capitalise on the finalising projects – but we are now at the point in time where we have to transform the vision for the last kilometres into something concrete.

Continued work is needed and we have to make sure that we avoid fragmentation with all the ongoing parallel initiatives.

A big thank you to all participants, speakers, moderators and Flatland for capturing on drawings our discussions!