Expert report provides evidence on how to address the roadblocks to turn Europe’s Advanced Materials top research into sustainable market-ready solutions.
Advanced Materials (AM) are recognised as key enablers of Europe’s competitiveness and resilience, alongside other critical technologies. According to the OECD, AM are materials “rationally designed to have new or enhanced properties and/or targeted structural features to achieve specific or improved functional performance,” including both emerging high-tech materials and advanced forms of low-tech materials. This includes, for instance, bio-based materials that use agricultural waste instead of petroleum-based inputs to produce sustainable chemicals and products (see SwissCore story on Bloom Biorenewables). Although not always visible, AM have become essential across sectors such as health, biotechnology, construction, agriculture, and mobility. To address this visibility gap, Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Start-ups, Research and Innovation, was tasked with developing an Advanced Materials Act (AM Act) in line with her September 2024 mission letter. A year later, the 2026 Commission Work Programme proposed adopting this new Act by late 2026.
Nonetheless, pressure for action had been mounting for years. The 2022 Advanced Materials 2030 Manifesto sparked major discussions at the EU level, leading to the adoption of a Commission Communication on Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership in February 2024. This strategy aimed to create a “dynamic, secure, and inclusive ecosystem for advanced materials in Europe”. Out of the 14 actions under this plan, two major outputs can be mentioned: (i) the establishment of a Technology Council for Advanced Materials, as a coordination platform for relevant R&I policies between stakeholders, Member States representatives and the European Commission; and (ii) the launch of the public-private partnership Innovative Advanced Materials for Europe (IAM4EU) – funded under Horizon Europe – aiming to advance the design, development, and uptake of innovative AM across Europe.
Political recognition also brought pressure to deliver a future-proof AM sector. To gather evidence on the AM Act and the burdens faced by the AM ecosystem, the Commission launched a public consultation in October 2025, concluding in January 2026. Before that, in March 2025, Commissioner Zaharieva already quietly tasked the Scientific Advice Mechanism (SAM) – an independent group providing scientific evidence and policy recommendations to the College of European Commissioners – with a thorough analysis of the following questions:
- What contribution can AM bring to the EU’s strategic autonomy?
- How can the cross-fertilisation of innovation in AM be enhanced?
These questions were based on a mandate to the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors (GCSA) – seven scientists from diverse fields tasked with providing policy advice. Following the SAM procedure, the GCSA consulted the Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), which produced a 200-page evidence review highlighting Europe’s research strengths, infrastructures, standards, and regulation, as well as promising applications. Swiss expertise was represented by Prof. Dr Nicola Marzari, Chair of Theory and Simulation of Materials at EPFL. Based on SAPEA’s evidence, the GCSA delivered its Scientific Opinion to Commissioner Zaharieva on 21 April 2026. It warned that despite Europe’s strong research base, the path from discovery to sustainable deployment faces major structural hurdles, which the report addresses with four key recommendations.
Recommendation 1 harnesses computational and data‑driven methodologies so that AI, Digital Twins and self‑driving labs can accelerate discovery, improve early risk screening, and ensure that the resulting materials, products and processes are safe and sustainable. In practice, the authors suggest making the FAIR principles the default for EU‑funded advanced materials research and embedding safety and sustainability data (FAIR+) into trusted, federated European data spaces. Such data spaces enable researchers, industry and regulators to securely share and reuse high‑quality, AI‑ready data, while tools such as Digital Twins and autonomous laboratories can simulate performance, environmental impacts and risks well before physical scale‑up.
Recommendation 2 builds on Europe’s comparative advantage in standards and regulation, combining performance‑based rules with digital product passports and access to testing and certification facilities across Europe. For example, the GCSA calls for the creation of a pan‑European network of testing, validation and certification facilities which allow researchers and innovators to test advanced materials under harmonised conditions and progressively demonstrate compliance as technologies mature. At the same time, digital product passports are proposed to increase transparency on material composition and circularity, rewarding high‑quality, low‑toxicity solutions and positioning European products as a global benchmark.
Recommendation 3 focuses on turning successful research into marketable products by coordinating infrastructure, partnerships, procurement, and circular business models, ensuring that promising materials move rapidly into sustainable, certifiable production systems. Key instruments proposed include a European Technology Infrastructures Catalogue providing a single access point to pilot lines, testbeds and scale‑up facilities, the strategic use of public procurement (particularly in areas such as energy, health and defence) to create early lead markets, and the mobilisation of public‑private partnerships (such as IAM4EU) to align research agendas, reduce fragmentation and de‑risk industrial deployment.
Recommendation 4 complements these actions by reinforcing Europe’s long‑term research and human-capital capacity while reducing fragmentation across the R&I landscape. This includes expanding ERC‑type funding for advanced materials research that explicitly accepts high scientific risk and long-term horizons, scaling up skills initiatives such as the European Advanced Materials Academy under the European Institute of Innovation & Technology, and better aligning EU and national funding instruments.
The latter point on alignment and coordination between EU and national activities allows us to draw a direct parallel with the current discussions regarding the future Horizon Europe and the European Competitiveness Fund, both of which are expected to include envelopes for AM. At the same time, another critical concern that the European Commission will have to provide clarity upon is to ensure that the AM Act remains coherent with other legislative or non-legislative files such as the Circular Economy Action Plan, the Clean Industrial Deal, the Critical Raw Materials Act, the Chips Act 2.0, the Biotech Act, or the Industrial Accelerator Act. The upcoming trilogues and the proposal for the AM Act by year’s end will hopefully provide some answers.