To lead in advanced materials, Europe must change how it innovates

Look inside almost anything Europe wants to lead the world in — a battery, a chip, a medical implant, a low-carbon building — and how well it performs depends on a variety of advanced materials. Whoever develops those advanced materials and gets them to market fastest sets the terms for everything built on top of them. That is why advanced materials have become a question of sovereignty and competitiveness. Europe is strong in research: discovering advanced materials is one of the things its laboratories do well. The difficulty is speed, and it runs the whole length of the journey from lab to market. Turning a discovery into a product made in Europe still takes ten to twenty years, and the slow pace sets in early: research is frequently done one experiment at a time — 20th century methods — while competitors are already using digital methods and approaches to move ahead at that stage. Downstream, the problems are structural: a broken path from lab to factory, value chains that never quite join up, too little finance to scale a proven result, and standards that move slower than the science. The United States and China build whole value chains from lab to market and reach scale at a speed Europe's fragmented efforts struggle to match. In our field, the competitiveness problem the Draghi report set out is mostly a problem of speed — at every stage. The means to change this now exist, and so does a rare political opening. Horizon Europe 2028–2034 is being designed; the new European Competitiveness Fund is being set up; and an Advanced Materials Act is due before the end of the year. Three levers, one window — and it will not open again for years. A word of caution for anyone tempted to treat this as a funding question alone. More money, poured into the same 20th century toolbox, buys Europe the same slow decade at a higher price. Funding is welcome and necessary — but what it has to buy is a different way of working, a 21st century toolbox. We call that way of working the HOW: one connected system in which an advanced material moves from first idea to industrial use without the chain ever breaking. At its centre is a simple, repeating loop, based on digital methods and approaches — plan an experiment, make the advanced material, measure what was really made, then feed the result back so it sharpens the next round — directed at every turn by the expertise of researchers and engineers. AI proposes promising candidates; self-driving labs, robots running experiments around the clock, make and test them, turning a year of trial and error into weeks; Europe's research and technology facilities measure what a new material exactly is and can do, then push it toward the factory floor; a shared, trusted data space lets every result travel between the teams that need it without anyone giving up ownership. What turns these separate strengths into a system is the connection between them — and across the advanced-materials community, that connected system is already taking shape. Across Europe, self-driving labs are already running — autonomous systems that design, run and learn from their own experiments around the clock. Recent European work has let an autonomous lab work through more than five hundred candidate catalysts at up to seventy-five a day, finding new high-performers free of scarce precious metals. The method works. Europe already has set course towards the 21st century toolbox — in 2025, the Horizon Europe public-private partnership on advanced materials, IAM4EU, was launched by the European Commission together with IAM-I. What Europe has started, it must see through. For Horizon Europe 2028–2034, we propose IAM4EU+ as the advanced-materials partnership to build and use this 21st-century toolbox. The toolbox is more than infrastructure. It is the shared standards, data environments, methods and more that turn scattered assets into a single working system. That connecting layer is what IAM4EU+ develops and holds together. Infrastructure and partnership develop in parallel and build on each other — each making the other work. Under the partnership, project teams take on the advanced materials behind Europe's strategic technologies as test cases — chips, batteries, hydrogen, quantum — and turn each result into a method others can reuse. It sits exactly where it should in the European machinery. Horizon Europe 2028–2034 funds the collaborative research; the Advanced Materials Act sets the rules; the Competitiveness Fund turns proven results into industry. IAM4EU+ is the partnership that can link them. The gains are real and measurable, and largest at the discovery and research end, where these methods can cut the work by half or more, sometimes far more. The later stages — scale-up, qualification, first industrial use — are harder to compress, especially in regulated fields like health, though they can move faster too. What we aspire to, end to end, is to bring a twenty-year journey within reach of ten, and a ten-year one within reach of five. The United States set itself this target in 2011, with its Materials Genome Initiative; Asia has since entered the race, and the pace keeps rising. Europe cannot afford to run on a toolbox it does not own — this, in the end, is a matter of sovereignty. So this is our ask of Europe's institutions and Member States: make IAM4EU+ the advanced-materials partnership of Horizon Europe 2028–2034, and let it play the connecting role it is built for. The science is ready. The instruments are coming together. What Europe needs now is the will to accelerate while the window is open — rather than spend another decade watching its own discoveries turn into someone else's industry. IAM-I is looking forward to building the 21st century toolbox together with the European Commission, policy makers and Member States. Fabrice Stassin is Chair of the Innovative Advanced Materials Initiative (IAM-I). Eva-Kathrin Schillinger is the Secretary General. IAM-I is the voice of European research and innovation in advanced materials and counts more than 300 entities across Europe and beyond.