Amid increasing global competition and fragmented research efforts regarding the development of advanced materials, the Innovative Advanced Materials Initiative (IAM-I) was founded on 30 January 2025, underscoring the strategic importance of advanced materials for Europe’s technological sovereignty. A clear need for a more coordinated European approach had emerged, as the lack of alignment across sectors had been slowing innovation, limiting market uptake, and weakening technological sovereignty.
The IAM-I unites industry, academia, research organisations, and policymakers under a shared framework, enabling them to jointly define research priorities and better align innovation with industrial needs. Its work focuses on building a cross-sector research and innovation (R&I) framework, that accelerates the development and market uptake of sustainable advanced materials for a digital and circular economy. By coordinating stakeholders across the entire materials value chain, defining strategic research priorities, and supporting policy alignment, IAM-I plays a crucial role in enhancing Europe’s competitiveness, technological sovereignty, and ability to address major societal and environmental challenges such as the green and digital transitions.
From Dependencies to Deployment: Europe’s Key Challenges
A little over one year after its establishment, a set of critical challenges for IAM-I and Europe’s advanced materials ecosystem has come into sharper focus. A major issue is the dependency on third country providers for certain raw materials amid rising global political and economic tensions. To improve its economic resilience and strengthen its competitive position, Europe needs to strengthen local value chains under a “Made in Europe” approach. At the same time, structural bottlenecks persist in the innovation landscape, including long development cycles, fragmented collaboration between research and industry, and limited coordination across stakeholders. To address these challenges, IAM-I fosters cross-sector collaboration through its Working Groups and Task Forces, while promoting better access to shared infrastructures such as pilot lines, engineering facilities, and data spaces. A critical barrier is the lack of adequate scale-up financing, especially in the €10–100 million range, which hinders the transition from research to market deployment. In addition, shifts in the funding and policy landscape, such as the move toward fewer but larger and more impact-driven initiatives require better alignment and strategic positioning. The initiative plays a key role in shaping policy and funding frameworks, contributing to instruments like the Advanced Materials Act and the future IAM4EU 2.0 partnership, to ensure a stronger focus on impact, scale-up, and market deployment. In particular, IAM-I advocates for improved financing conditions, including addressing the scale-up funding gap, to help bridge the divide between research and industrial application and enable European innovations to reach global markets. A major highlight was the plan to launch a €2 billion partnership under the next EU research programme, focusing on larger, market-oriented initiatives.
Contributing to the Strategic Direction of Advanced Materials Innovation in Europe
As an active member of the IAM-I, the EURICE Group supports the alignment of research, industry, and policy, helping to bridge the gap between innovation and market deployment, an area where it has extensive experience through coordinating and supporting large-scale European projects and partnerships. The membership also allows us to engage directly in shaping strategic initiatives such as IAM4EU and future FP10 programmes. The EURICE team took part in the first IAM-I General Assembly held on 15–16 April 2026 at Lund University in Sweden, underlining its continued engagement within IAM-I Working Groups and Task Forces. During the meeting, the members reflected on progress, emerging priorities, and necessary adjustments in light of a shifting global and policy context.