European Commission Signs €150M Grant Funding the Graphene Flagship

The European Commission (EC) has signed the €150M grant agreement to continue funding the Graphene Flagship’s research and innovation on graphene and related materials from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2023. With this signature, the EC continues its commitment to support the €1B Flagship project, which began in 2013.

Jari Kinaret, Director of the Graphene Flagship, says: “Although we will keep supporting fundamental research on graphene and related materials, in this new phase our project will focus on advancing industrial applications. One third of the €150M will be dedicated to high-TRL applications, which will probably hit the market within the next few years. Moreover, with this new Core 3 agreement we renew our consortium and welcome around 25% new partners, most of them leading industries in Europe in key sectors. Together, we will achieve a more sustainable future and achieve our ultimate goal – bringing graphene to the market.”

Over the past seven years, the Graphene Flagship has successfully brought graphene out of the lab, creating a fruitful European industrial ecosystem that develops applications of graphene and related materials.Today, our industrial family includes over 100 companies working together with the Graphene Flagship academic partners in fields ranging from automotive and aviation to electronics, energy, composites and biomedicine. The proportion of companies has grown from 15% at the launch of the Graphene Flagship to roughly 50% today, demonstrating the success of the EC’s Flagship concept.

The accelerating pace of industrialisation is clearly demonstrated by the Graphene Flagship Spearhead Project programme, originally launched in 2018 and expanded in 2020, which targets specific market-motivated industrial applications of graphene and related materials. These industry-led projects develop diverse devices and products from car batteries and autonomous vehicles, to water and air filtration systems and airplane de-icing technologies and beyond.

Through the Graphene Flagship, Europe has established itself as the global leader for technologies based on graphene and other related layered materials, securing our competitiveness in a market estimated to reach a value of more than €500M by 2025. The Graphene Flagship has helped graphene and related materials technologies to cross the valley of death, creating new successful products and spin-off companies, unlocking the European innovation potential in an unprecedented way.

In 2018, Graphene Flagship partners showed that over 2,000 materials can exist in a two-dimensional form, starting a worldwide rush for their investigation and exploitation. These new layered materials exhibit similar superlative properties to graphene’s and combining them opens a myriad of new possibilities. This will allow European industries to vastly improve their products and workflows and even to solve some of the environmental crises our society faces today. At the Graphene Flagship, we are excited to see new results as our work continues over the next three years.