The Graphene Flagship welcomes 18 new individual Associated Members

The Graphene Flagship Associated Members (AMs) currently represent around 40% of the organisations related to our project. These institutions play a key role in finding market applications for graphene and layered materials, pushing our technology to higher TRL levels and driving the commercialisation of new graphene-enabled solutions.

Through Graphene Flagship partner the European Science Foundation, our project is continuously open to new collaborations. In fact, since the beginning of our latest funding phase (Core 3), we have welcomed 18 new individual Associated Members, distributed across Europe. Of these, two thirds are companies, both small and medium enterprises and bigger corporations; the rest are innovation-focused research centres in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Sweden and the UK.

The new Graphene Flagship Associated Members tackle a wide variety of challenges associated with the development of graphene and layered materials, from the development of sustainable solutions for data-storage to the large-scale manufacturing of 2D materials, ensuring quality control and reproducibility.

Graphene Flagship AMs work in close collaboration with our core consortium partners and Work Packages to ensure advances in the field of graphene and layered materials and accelerate market penetration. These institutions receive funding from different sources, either calls from the European Commission outside the FET Flagship programme, funding agencies in Member States and private investments. AMs join the Graphene Flagship to significantly contribute to the technology and innovation roadmap, as well as our overall mission: finding applications for graphene and layered materials and bringing them to market.

Yuri Svirko, Leader of the Graphene Flagship Partnering Division, says: “In the Partnering Division, we foster synergies between the Associated Members and Partnering Projects and the Core project. Since the start of Core 3, we have seen great interest from SMEs, companies, and research institutions in joining our team at the Graphene Flagship from different countries including Norway, Estonia, Serbia and Luxembourg, among others.”

Jari Kinaret, Director of the Graphene Flagship, adds: “The collaboration with institutions that receive funding outside of our core consortium is an integral feature of the federated funding model of the Graphene Flagship. With the Associated Members and Partnering Project part of the Graphene Flagship initiative, we maximise the reach of our initiatives and welcome several participants with great expertise in the graphene industry, the large-scale manufacture of layered materials and the development of innovative products. We all look forward to fruitful results.”