To create a platform for meeting the challenges of the future, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has set up the internal Markets Beyond Tomorrow program. It focuses on identifying the problems that need to be addressed and what people expect from the research work involved. Here, too, Fraunhofer lets itself be guided by the needs of society: People need health, energy, communication, a healthy environment, mobility and security. In numerous projects, Fraunhofer is delivering the building blocks for solving future issues.

Starting from the global social challenges that have to be faced, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft examined its portfolio across all of its institutes in a process that identified five future issues which can be expected to create growth markets requiring considerable research: 
 - Low-loss generation, distribution and use of electricity. 
 - Affordable health. 
 - Recycling of materials in production. 
 - Low-emission, reliable mobility in urban areas. 
 - Disaster prediction and management.

Fraunhofer intends to offer integrated solutions for these Markets Beyond Tomorrow and aims to be the technology leader on the German and European research landscape. The institutes were encouraged to join together in consortia to make use of existing synergies. They were also invited to present those technological projects they felt would meet future challenges, what the social benefit of such projects would be in each case, and which markets they would open up for Fraunhofer. “If we pool the distributed capabilities and technologies and concentrate them specifically on the issues that need to be addressed we can develop comprehensive solutions that are beyond the means of individual institutes alone,” states Fraunhofer-President, Prof. Hans-Jörg Bullinger, highlighting the synergistic potential.

To identify particularly promising projects, Fraunhofer invited entries to an internal competition. External experts from industry, trade associations and public authorities helped Fraunhofer to assess and select the entries. In February the jury chose five outstanding projects. Following a second competition round further projects will follow in the autumn.

It is hoped that the Beyond Tomorrow projects will produce marketable results in the coming three years. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is providing 33 million euros in funding. Further information about the projects is available in the following press releases: 
 - Skin with healing properties from the Petri dish 
 - SteriHealth – for better medical hygiene  
 - Supergrid: efficient generation, storage and distribution of electricity 
 - Hybrid energy storage system for urban use 
 - Perfectly separated for resource-efficient production.