No results...

Analysis of EU industrial R&I investments on advanced materials in alignment with the innovation markets of the Materials 2030 Manifesto and in the context of their competitive sustainability in line with the European Green Deal initiative

Analysis of EU industrial R&I investments on advanced materials study’s purpose was to support data-driven and evidence-based policy making in this technology area, particularly by having in mind the green and digital transitions. As such, it primarily aimed at informing and supporting the strategic materials agenda prepared by the Materials 2030 Initiative, which is in turn heavily based on the Materials 2030 Manifesto and Roadmap. This was done by striving to identify and define advanced materials technologies, and then linking companies to these technologies in order to conduct the analysis on two different levels: 1) Industrial R&D&I investments and 2) market analysis. 

The study started off with defining of the advanced materials technologies based on Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) families which was done in close cooperation with the European Commission, i.e. DG RTD. A total of 19 CPC classes, each containing a number of CPC codes related to advanced materials technologies were included in the study. An effort was made to also link the nine innovation markets identified in Materials 2030 Manifesto with the relevant 4-digit NACE codes. One of the major challenges during the study was to directly link companies to the nine innovation markets since not all identified companies could be connected with these markets due to several limitation, mainly the nature of the Orbis database.

The methodology development process and the resulting analyses were done as follows:

Main sources used were Orbis, Dealroom, PATSTAT, and Technote databases. The former three were first used to identify companies active in the relevant industries, as companies were main unit of analysis in this study.

Second step was to identify relevant CPC codes and classes for the advanced materials. This effort led to reaching a list of 5 481 CPC codes linked to advanced materials technologies and grouped in 19 CPC patent families. Only patents granted to private companies were taken into consideration in later analyses. Then most innovative step in the study’s methodology was linking companies to advanced materials technologies. 

Patenting activities dynamics, including the EU’s positioning in terms of innovation leaders and patenting related to advanced materials were then analysed.

Orbis database was used to link companies to one of the nine innovation markets considered in the Materials 2030 Manifesto. An effort was also made to directly investigate the EU’s market share within the nine innovation markets. R&I investments per CPC classes were also calculated, as well as a thorough analysis of investments by start-ups, which is important for identifying growing technology areas with the potential for further development.