Despite significant recent progress made by the EU industry, the level of digitalisation of industry remains uneven, depending on the sector, country and company size. Facing at the same time a scattered landscape of Research, Industry and Institutional stakeholders, the efficient adoption and transformation of enabling technologies into business visions & concrete market cases remain limited. This slow diffusion of digital technologies poses a risk to the EU’s ability to compete in the global economy.
This is particularly true for Organic Large Area Electronics (OLAE) enabling technologies whose industry made significant progress recently and has established itself as a competitive growth industry. Despite proving that more and more products have matured onto the global market, the actual diffusion and efficient adoption of OLAE technologies remain limited.
Underlying reasons and key challenges are identified (cost, processes, encapsulation, scalability, yield, standards & regulations), for which major breakthroughs are needed on use, production and cost rather than on basic technology, which reflects the growing market orientation of OLAE.
To address both market & technology specific challenges, SmartEEs plays a key role to link technology promises with real use cases. These are implemented through a unique digitalisation experience providing direct and concrete experimentation of OLAE technologies, valorizing the uniqueness of these technologies through disruptive product & service ideas.
Overall objectives of SmartEEs were to
- increase awareness of and interest in the possibilities of OLAE within European industry, European investors, governments and other important stakeholders;
- increase the efficiency & effectiveness of the EU innovation ecosystem for OLAE, incl. research organisations and application-oriented companies, as well as supporting organisations, investors and governments;
- demonstrate actual business opportunities by taking on actual business development of OLAE based innovations;
- identify and make operational approaches for boosting the use of OLAE by the EU industry, involving the most important stakeholders in actual OLAE based business developments;
- create an open and sustainable network of partners that will consolidate the further awareness creation, development of the ecosystem and demonstration of OLAE.
