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The recently launched Microsoft YouthSpark initiative, unites longstanding programs aimed at helping young people to reach their full potential. For all Microsoft initiatives across Europe see our new Empowering Youth hub. Key initiatives and programmes enabling the development of digital skills and competences:

The Europe 2020 flagship initiative Youth on the Move is a comprehensive package of initiatives to improve young people’s education and employability, reduce high youth unemployment and increase the overall youth employment rate.

Webinar with the EU's Chief Scientific Adviser Anne Glover. Learn how to bridge Europe's skills gap in science, engineering and technology – and ensure EU competitiveness in future industries.

Learn how Europe's small and middle-sized companies can drive global competitiveness through innovation partnerships, listen to the webinar with Henry Chesbrough, father of open innovation and Marko Turpeinen, Head of EIT ICT Labs Helsinki Node and Member of the board of AppCampus.

AppCampus is an €18 million open innovation program to accelerate the development of mobile applications funded by Microsoft, Nokia and Aalto University in Finland.

The Programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (COSME) provides business and innovation support, in particular for SMEs, through its Europe Enterprise Network. It is expected to assist 40,000 companies with partnership agreements, resulting in €400mn annually in additional turnover for assisted companies and 1,200 new business products, services or processes...

Companies want employees who can think critically, work collaboratively and communicate through new technology. A revolutionary project is teaching students how to do them all.

Berlin’s Trifense, an EIT Entrepreneurship Award winner, takes a new approach to Internet security – and starts to gain traction in the market.

Victor Henning, co-founder of Mendeley, an online service that helps academic researchers organise and share the mounds of documents they collect, hardly looked up from his computer screen when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. He was immersed in the day-to-day routines of his start-up, including getting more users and securing the next round of venture capital.

Some revolutionary ideas for school reform are not so new. The 17th-century philosopher and ecclesiastic Comenius had important things to say about 21st-century education. More than 300 years ago, he favoured “learning through play”, arguing that the successful acquisition of knowledge was active, not passive and that it should be a pleasure, not a task. “That guy was ahead of his...

Why the industrial model – hierarchical organizations using standardised methods to produce uniform products – no longer works for schools or students.

Somewhere in the world, this scene is taking place. The lights are low in the living room, and a couple wants to switch from a video game to a movie.

Innovative teachers + technology + smart policies = the active learning and collaborative skills required for the 21st century.

A start-up created by two British medics combines social networks and cloud computing to make hospital staffing more efficient.

Looking back at his three-year term as chairman of the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT), Martin Schuurmans has mixed feelings.

In terms of modernising educational systems, Commissioner Vassiliou says, “We have a long way to go”.

If doctors could use natural user interfaces, like gestures, surgery could be quicker and safer.

International rankings confirm Europe “must do better”.

In just 15 years, Switzerland’s government and universities have worked to make the country a leader in entrepreneurship. It may be known for snow-covered mountains and cold-weather sports, but in terms of innovation, Switzerland is hot. The Alpine country with a population of 7.6 million is home to 61 technology parks, and its universities churn out dozens of science-based start-ups every year.

The EU is preparing a new global list of institutions of higher learning that will be “more open, more transparent, more useful”.

In November 2008, the French magazine Le Tigre published "Marc L.," a portrait of a 29-year-old who worked for an architecture firm near Bordeaux. The author had never met his subject but needed only a few minutes of Web searching to discover a large number of personal details, right down to his girlfriend’s name, her parents’ address, and what he did on his last vacation.

Microsoft’s innovation’s magazine FUTURES released an interview with ROBERT MADELIN, Director-general for Information Society and Media at the European Commission.

Microsoft is taking Facebook to the office and tailoring your Twitter feed.

Online messaging hasn’t changed much since it was introduced more than a decade ago. But German start-up Cooee, based in Kaiserlautern, is seeking to liven up the chat experience with elements from computer gaming and social networking.

Visit a website, get a cookie. You can’t see it, but it is a small file that is installed on your computer whenever you browse a travel site, buy books online or search for a new refrigerator. The cookie remembers you, allowing the site to store information about you and your preferences – and making you a better advertising target.

In May 2010 the European Commission adopted its Digital Agenda, with “enhancing digital literacy skills and inclusion” as a priority. “Improving digital literacy is crucial to Europe’s future,” Commissioners Neelie Kroes and Androulla Vassiliou announced. “We must invest in the e-skills of all EU citizens to make sure that no one is left behind as the economy goes...

More than 100 million people in Western Europe will buy a smartphone this year. Within minutes of opening the package they will be setting up connections to mail servers, downloading third-party applications and synchronising music and games with their existing online life.

Founded three years ago, Kobojo develops games for social media such as Facebook. Now it is developing a business model that transforms virtual currencies into hard euros.

When Richard Banks’ grandfather died about five years ago, he left behind a suitcase filled with hundreds of photographs, many depicting his time as a pilot during World War II. Looking through those images made Banks think about the legacy he would leave his daughter, and about the physical limitations of photos and floppy disks that become obsolete as images and information are increasingly stored...

Scammers are getting more clever. But software companies and policymakers are becoming smarter too.

How often has a friend tweeted you from a restaurant? Weren’t you curious to know where exactly it was? Since late 2009, Twitter users have been able to add details of their location to a tweet. Bing Twitter Maps, a new Twitter-based app developed by Microsoft researchers, merges these geotagged public tweets with the rich geographical information available via Bing Maps.

It’s nearly impossible for companies to stay on top of the explosion of useful information about markets, competitors and customers that crops up daily on social media and other websites. But that’s also a business opportunity – and one seized by British start-up, Artesian, which seeks to transform the torrent of web-based information into a wellspring of business intelligence.

“Every human being is author of his own health or disease,” the Buddha said. Some 2,500 years later, technology is allowing patients to truly take control of their own well-being in what may be the biggest medical revolution in decades: the computerisation of personal health records (PHRs).

For Irish entrepreneur John Dennehy, the arrival of cloud computing offered a powerful argument to launch a new company. Dennehy was convinced that many smaller businesses would shift to buying software and computer services delivered and managed over the Internet – the so-called cloud – because it would allow them to save money, grow faster and go global at a fraction of the cost.

Finland has set out to create a university that has innovation built into its foundations, merging three institutions into one along the way.  Is Aalto a model for universities in other countries?

Electricity companies around the world are racing to develop equipment to help homes and apartments automatically slash energy use. These “smart home” technologies are being tested from San Francisco to Seoul, but many of the do-it-yourself kits are complicated to install and configure. More sophisticated systems are expensive and require professional installation. As a result, global rollout of...

Belgian IT engineer Didier Beka had a new idea: software that would enable people with hearing or speaking disabilities to communicate by telephone. Beka knew he had the technical expertise to develop the product but he lacked business experience to build a company around it. “I needed commercial advice,” he says.

For French robotics pioneer Jean-Christophe Baillie, an entrepreneurial adventure that began in Paris five years ago led to a visit to Microsoft’s R&D headquarters in the US.

Fishing Cactus is a start-up that began in the world of entertainment games. Now it’s moving into what are called “serious games” – starting with one that can help doctors support patients left with impaired motor skills after an accident.

Andreas Klinger’s 18-month struggle to find money for a new company helps explain why Europe doesn’t produce more start-ups. Klinger pursued investors for his Internet-based fashion company across a continent, from the beer gardens of Munich to plush hotels in Moscow. “It was a crazy circus. We had to produce our business plan in several languages, accompanied by 15-sheet spreadsheets...

Billy Boyle is the kind of entrepreneur European policy makers would love to clone. Working out of a basement lab at Cambridge University, Boyle and two fellow chemical engineers pioneered a sensor system on a microchip to detect toxic gases and compounds used in explosives.

Government grants are often so complex and costly to obtain that small companies never bother.

Today’s computer games depend on hand-held controllers that respond to physical touch. Kinect does away with any physical connection to the video game processors controlling the screen.

European governments that cut spending on research and innovation to help rein in budget deficits risk sacrificing the EU’s future prosperity, warns an independent panel of senior policy makers and business leaders.

Microsoft Innovation Centres around Europe aim to help harness great ideas and turn them into successful businesses while creating jobs, helping people and contributing to both Microsoft’s success and local European economies along the way.

Go is a game so complex that raw computing power was never going to be enough to turn it into a competitive computer game. But two Cambridge researchers found a way – with a programming language used for analysing financial risks.

Personalised healthcare stands at the confluence of the most powerful technologies in the history of the life sciences.  

The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) is taking part in a pioneering EU Framework Programme 7 project on cloud computing , Venus-C - a project that aims to foster the development of a cloud computing platform based on virtualisation technologies not for individuals, but for industry and the scientific community.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Microsoft joined forces in 2008 to create the BSC-Microsoft Research Centre.

Sahara dust forecasting, cancer genome sequencing or the design of computer’s next generation of microprocessors are among the scientific challenges that the BSC’s 63 teraflop (equivalent to the power of 210,000 standard PCs) MareNostrum is tackling at the moment.

It’s been all change in Brussels, and innovation now has a new Commissioner. And Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has made it crystal clear that she intends to be her own woman.

On June 20th 2012, in the presence of Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt, sustainability legend Gro Harlem Brundtland, IPCC Chair Rajendra K. Pachauri, EU Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard and 150 VIP guests at Rio+20, Eye on Earth has been chosen for the prestigious SUSTAINIA 100 list of solutions. For more information, you can visit:...

Sylvie Laffarge tells FUTURES why eSkills are increasingly important for immigrant women looking for employment in the EU.

Europe and the US may have very different ways of funding health, but they have much in common, too. A new program is exploring what we might learn from each other.

Superbowl Sunday is big business in the US as people all over the nation tune in to watch the American football match of the year. Pizza deliveries soar on what is one of the highest days of food consumption in the US. This year Domino’s Pizza found a new way to cope with the sudden burst of demand on its computing resources: using “the cloud” for extra capacity.

There is one game-changer that can turn the promise of personalised healthcare into a reality. It is healthcare IT, says Alan Davies from GE Healthcare.

Huge industrial robots are now a mature industry. Young French entrepreneur Jean-Christophe Baillie believes it is time for them to move from factories to the home. The founder and CEO of robotics software start-up Gostai, Baillie envisions a bold paradigm shift in robotics – and last December he received a big vote of confidence when the judges in the ACES Awards for Academic Enterprise gave him the...

Biologists have long had to fight against the idea that theirs is a ‘soft’ science. Now, armed with tools from computer science, they are changing our ideas about life itself.

The cloud is one of the most popular terms in IT today but perhaps also one of the least well defined. FUTURES guides you through the how and the why.

Computer science can play a major role in fuelling scientific breakthroughs in other fields, but only if it can meet its own grand challenges, said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft at a symposium in Brussels debating how best to use EU-funded research programmes to solve grand challenges.

Interoperability and building trust in the privacy and security of eHealth systems is the route to patient-centric healthcare

What developing countries need is a stable, sustainable, robust and low-cost means of delivering services and information.

Take an ancient town, a new university, Microsoft Research and a fresh approach to computational systems biology. Mix well. Then apply…

There’s a new technology coming into your home. But unlike many, this one should save you money.

Big challenges can encourage big solutions, and at the end of last year there was no challenge bigger than Europe’s response to the economic turmoil caused by the global credit crisis.

Environmental scientists face many challenges in monitoring and understanding our planet’s changing climate.

In May 2009, a Brussels seminar examined the potential of computers to save energy – and the obstacles to realising that potential.

How a student from Wrocław became an expert in software verification – via Aachen and Redmond.

As a teenager in 1990s war-torn Kosovo, Alban Rrustemi loved a good crime film – especially one with computing gadgets.

Is a European Innovation Act what’s needed to make Europe more innovative and strengthen growth and competitiveness in the EU? Policymakers, analysts and businesses are currently debating that very question as the EU considers what to do post-Lisbon.

Peer Bork, who heads a team of bioinformatic researchers at the Heidelberg, Germany- based European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), has been recognised for his outstanding contributions to the field by winning the fourth annual Royal Society and Académie des Sciences Microsoft Award

On 16 June 2009, the King of Belgium, Albert II, visited one of Belgium’s innovation hotspots, the Digital Innovation Valley in Mons. During the visit the King, Walloon Minister for Economy Jean-Claude Marcourt and Mons mayor Elio Di Rupo stopped by the Microsoft Innovation Centre in Mons.

When the new Commission is appointed, it will find a raft of proposals waiting for it – all aimed at putting research, development and innovation at the heart of policy.

Fifty-five researchers met in Trento, Italy, in October to look for collaborative solutions to the limitations that are emerging in the way that models of complex biological systems are created and managed.

John Wood, Chair of the European Research Area Board, gives a personal assessment of how research needs to change and adapt to face the future.

Who would start a business development for start-ups in a slump? That’s precisely when it has to be done, says Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Akhtar Badshah wants to be a disruptive influence

Inspired by biology, Klaus-Peter Zauner is working on a radically new kind of computer.

A new research group in Paris aims to use optimisation theory to find answers to the challenges of ensuring an efficient and sustainable future.

Potential cost-savings from eHealth are being jeopardised because computer systems cannot talk to one another, according to experts from the public and private sectors at a meeting in Brussels in September organised by Microsoft.

European Environment Agency and Microsoft Eye on Earth Observatory bring Europaan beach quality into sharp focus