OLEDSOLAR: €7.9 Million Horizon EU Funding for Smarter Opto-Electronics Manufacturing
How we helped build, write and fund a 16-partner European consortium developing innovative manufacturing processes and in-line monitoring for the OLED and thin-film solar industries.
At a glance
The challenge
Opto-electronic devices are opening new applications everywhere: flexible OLED displays and lighting on pliable substrates, and thin-film solar cells that can wrap curved surfaces or integrate into buildings. But between the laboratory and mass production stand hard problems: scale-up, process selection, yield, quality control and time-to-market. High-value products were being lost to defects that in-line inspection could not yet catch, and production lines took too long to reconfigure between products.
The solution
OLEDSOLAR developed innovative manufacturing processes for critical production steps of OLEDs, OPVs and CIGS solar cells, combined with a complete in-line hybrid system of inspection, quality control and functional testing, automation software for roll-to-roll and sheet-to-sheet manufacturing, and recycling strategies for high-value materials.
Targets that made the bid quotable
What we did
1. Concept development
We helped shape a broad technology ambition into a call-shaped concept: four numbered innovation pillars (processes, inspection, recycling, automation), each with a quantified target that evaluators could score directly against the Factories of the Future topic requirements.
2. Building a 16-partner consortium
A proposal of this scale needs the whole value chain: Europe's leading applied research organisations (VTT, Fraunhofer, TNO among seven RTOs), a university, and eight industrial partners from SMEs to large companies, including end users like OPVIUS and Solibro who brought the pilot and production lines where results would be validated.
3. Proposal writing and submission
We supported the drafting of the full Excellence, Impact and Implementation sections, aligning sixteen partners' contributions into one coherent work plan, quantified impact story and credible budget, through to submission on the Commission's portal.
The result
The project scaled its manufacturing innovations through three pilot lines into validation on four industrial production lines, strengthening Europe's position in flexible electronics and thin-film photovoltaics manufacturing.
Why this matters for your organisation
Large collaborative bids succeed on structure: pillars mapped to call objectives, partners mapped to the value chain, and targets an evaluator can verify. OLEDSOLAR is the template we still apply to Horizon Europe proposals today.
If you are preparing a Horizon Europe, Innovate UK or other collaborative application, we can support concept development, consortium building, proposal writing, evaluator-style review and full submission. And if a project is not competitive, we will tell you before you spend money on it.