Quantum Futures
Emerging-technology expertise for the public sector
Quantum Futures is a Quantum Social Lab initiative designed to give public authorities and companies access to the research expertise they need to govern emerging technologies.
Quantum technologies are moving from laboratory to application, reshaping industries and taking on the status of a strategic asset. But their development is expensive, their use cases still uncertain, and the specialists who understand them are scarce — a gap that neither public administrations nor mid-sized companies can close by hiring. Quantum Futures was created to make that expertise available where decisions are actually being made, drawing on the doctoral researchers and specialists already working on these questions rather than asking institutions to build capacity they cannot sustain.
Who we are
Quantum Futures is an initiative of the Quantum Social Lab at the TUM Think Tank, which since 2022 has worked at the intersection of emerging technologies, governance and society at the Munich University of Politics. Our affiliation spans two faculties — computer science and politics — which lets us move between the technical substance of a question and its regulatory and societal consequences. Around the lab sits a body of doctoral research on the procurement of emerging technologies, the governance of quantum systems, quantum-computing-based language models, and quantum financial instruments. We are currently developing Quantum Futures into a sustainable structure through Catalyst GER's Validate program.
What we do
We aim to work with public authorities and companies on concrete questions about quantum and other emerging technologies: what a technology can plausibly do, what it would mean to deploy it, and how it can be governed while it is still taking shape. Our counterparts are desk officers and specialist staff in federal and state ministries and authorities, state digital agencies, municipal associations, and strategy teams in companies — particularly mid-sized firms without their own research capacity. What these organizations share is a need for judgment in an uncertain situation, at a point where products are still far from market and hiring a permanent specialist is neither possible nor proportionate.
How we do it
Each engagement pairs the people who hold the problem with the people already researching it. An expert database maps the specializations of doctoral candidates and advanced students, alongside specialists we contract for the duration of a task, so a team can be assembled around a specific question rather than drawn from a fixed roster. From this we have built a tiered menu of formats: a one-day policy clinic as an entry point, then workshops, policy briefs, technology assessments, commissioned research, and at the far end sponsored doctoral positions. The arrangement is deliberately two-sided — organizations get expertise they could not otherwise reach, and early-career researchers see their work take effect outside the lab. Our first prototype, Futurefield, is funded by SPRIND's "Germany, what goes?" mission and helps public bodies set up regulatory sandboxes under the Federal Testing Act.
