ÆRTOs will network major applied research activities of four EU Member States (DE, FR, FI, and NL) and one Associated State (NO). Further countries will join the project later. The research activities to be networked are “National Research and Technology Organisations (RTOs)”. These are programme organisations mandated by their national government to undertake strategic research in support of societal development including economic competitiveness and innovation. They receive dedicated programme funding – sometimes referred to as “core funding” – from their government for this purpose. They are public research programmes targeted at fulfilling strategic national objectives. There are no supra-national RTOs in Europe, although some RTOs have limited extra-national activities within Europe, and inter-RTO cooperation is mostly limited to case-by-case project cooperation. Greater cooperation among RTOs would produce important efficiency gains by exploiting synergies and avoiding duplication of effort, and a stronger coordinated pan-European RTO infrastructure would enhance Europe’s attractiveness as an R&D location and so help retain industrial R&D investment here at a time of increasing globalisation. A major constraint at present on large-scale inter-RTO cooperation in Europe is the national “lock-in” effect caused by the current national core funding regimes. ÆRTOs’s ambition is to break that constraint by establishing a principle of RTO partnership based on cooperation and reciprocity. The project has the enthusiastic support of the RTO programme owners of the five participating countries. The aim of the proposed ERA-NET, therefore, is to begin the construction of a new, integrated pan-European RTO infrastructure by identifying and implementing research activities of common interest (full and variable geometry) which promise added value from greater cooperation, and by developing corresponding sustainable modes of governance and funding.