Acceleration of advanced materials development and upscaling along the value chain

Background and scope

Advanced Materials are defined as materials that are engineered with a view to enhancing functional performance above and beyond that of existing materials. They are key enablers for the development of game-changing products and innovative solutions in many industrial sectors, such as energy, mobility, electronics, and construction. 

As stated in the European Commission Communication “Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership, there is an urgent need to boost all the stages of development of advanced materials, such as their design, scale-up and manufacturing capacity (from lab to fab), as demand for these materials is expected to increase significantly in the coming years. 

This requires investment to identify and bring breakthrough innovations to the market that cover the full value chain from developers and producers of advanced materials alongside those companies developing digital tools for designing, synthesising, modelling and characterising advanced materials including those supported by Artificial Intelligence / machine learning. 

This Challenge therefore aims at scaling SMEs belonging to the whole value chain of advanced materials and addressing one or more of these four key application areas: energy, mobility, electronics, construction. It contributes to a common European approach in accelerating the scaling up of advanced materials, a critical technology identified under the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP), and thereby addresses the risks to the EU’s future strategic autonomy in this area.

Specific objectives

Companies supported under this Challenge should target one or both of the following areas, taking into account the Safe and Sustainable by Design framework, including Life Cycle Assessment and circularity approaches:

• Technologies for design, synthesis, characterisation, up-scaling, and production
  of advanced materials.
• Scaling up processes to reach the targeted functionalities or improved
  performance of advanced materials, such as surface functionalization of
  nanoparticles, or additive manufacturing approaches which may enable a fast
  integration of the advanced materials into smart devices.

The advanced materials and associated processes in the above mentioned four key application areas must be developed minimizing the use of resources, in particular critical raw materials (CRMs), and the environmental footprint. The latter is to be measured with a life-cycle analysis that includes an evaluation of the cost and social impact.

Expected outcomes and impacts

In support of the Commission Communication on Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership, the European Green Deal industrial plan, the New European Innovation Agenda, Digital Europe and the EU Economic Security Strategy, this Challenge is expected to:

• Strengthen the European value chain of advanced materials in the energy, mobility, electronics, and construction application areas.
• Enable a more diversified, digitally driven, and risk-aware configuration of the European advanced materials value chain and associated processes and technologies.
• Accelerate market uptake of advanced materials in the energy, mobility, electronics, and construction industrial sectors.
• Address the EU’s industrial dependency on imports of resources, such as CRMs, for the energy, mobility, electronics, and construction sectors. 

Companies selected for support under this Challenge will become part of the wider advanced materials ecosystem to be fostered by the different actions set out in the Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership, amongst these the new co-programmed partnership IAM4EU.

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EIC Work Programme 2025

The EIC Challenges are extensively described in the EIC Work Programme. For more information about this challenge, please go to the corresponding section of the EIC Work Programme.