"The analysis of emerging technologies and their potential impact on markets, economies and societies requires reliable and repeatable methods and tools since the related information plays a critical role for strategic decisions of private and public organizations. All existing techniques reveal several weaknesses such as limited accuracy on middle and long-term forecast; poor repeatability; poor adaptability, i.e. no universal methods are known, besides complementary instruments must be integrated according to the specific goal and data availability. These considerations highlight the need to introduce structured methods and tools capable to support strategic decisions in industrial R&D activities, by managing the multi-disciplinary complexity of current systems and by anticipating the future characteristics of products and processes.The final FORMAT project result will be the development of an innovative forecasting methodology, backed by a web semantic IT tool, supporting decision making in Manufacturing Industries, to be evaluated in real test cases and extensively described in the FORMAT handbook and through an IT demonstrator to proof the concept."