The present proposal is intended to take the European Solar  Telescope (EST) to the next level of development by undertaking crucial activities to improve the performance of current  state-of-the-art instrumentation. Legal, industrial and socio-economic issues will also be addressed, as key questions for  the attainment of EST. The particular developments and strategic tasks proposed here can be summarised in
the following  specific objectives:

(i) Boosting new generation detectors, with the development of two  prototype sensors, one for large-format imaging and a the other for high-precision polarimetry, the evaluation of an  existing large format wavefront sensing camera is also addressed;

(ii) Development of a capacitance-stabilised Fabry-Perot prototype  for a high quality control of the parallelism of the etalon plates;

(iii) new techniques for 2D solar spectro-polarimetry; with integral  field units based on multi-slit image slicers or a microlensfed spectrograph;

(iv) development of large format liquid-crystal modulators, required  for the large-format sensors that will be needed for the new generation large aperture telescopes ;

(v) evaluation of the performance of the EST-MCAO deformable  mirrors to improve the design and performance of this system; 

(vi) strategic work to covering industrial, financial and legal issues  related the future construction and operation of EST.

The following issues will be addressed:
• Elaboration of a census of the European solar physics community
• Analysis of the technological expertise of European companies in  the different countries and their potential expertise related with the construction needs of EST
• Revision and update of the construction budget of EST
• Stimulation of a discussion of all these aspects within the  consortium EAST

With all these elements in hand, the project will be in the condition  to present a definite proposal for detailed design, construction, managing and operation of EST.