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, SmartEEs2 will be key role to link technology promises with real use/business cases. These cases will be implemented through a unique digitalisation experience providing experimentation, testing or support to manufacturing. SmartEEs2 will capitalize upon SmartEEs’ strong technological OLAE platform and focuss on the uptake of Flexible & Wearable Electronics (FWE) enabling use cases, where OLAE can valorize its uniqueness (flexibility, conformability) and its promises for solutions in the fast growing business of wearables and Internet of Everything.
SmartEEs2 will orchestrate a pan-EU collaboration network of Regional DIHs promoting the best quality level of digitalisation experience, hence boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall OLAE European innovation ecosystem.
