Launching a Pact for Innovation at 7EIS

Hosted by Knowledge4Innovation, the 7th European Innovation Summit took place at the European Parliament in Brussels on 7–10 December. With everyone from young entrepreneurs and students to European Commissioners and MEPs in attendance, the stage was set for exciting discussions on how Europe can bridge the innovation gap. Cefic co-organised a Breakfast debate on ‘Advanced materials and breakthrough opportunities for the energy transition’ at the event. Science writer Ben Skuse reports.

More than 1 500 delegates, including more than 50 MEPs, attended 2015’s European Innovation Summit (7EIS), offering a unique opportunity for stakeholders across the spectrum to get together and discuss the key challenges and opportunities for Europe to capitalise on its innovation potential, increase its competitiveness and help solve global problems.

Alongside the cross-sector, cross-disciplinary themes discussed throughout 7EIS’s plenary sessions and coffee breaks, a number of more targeted debates took place at the event. These offered the chance to hear sector-specific challenges and opportunities from leading stakeholders in each field. Critical topics including industry, environment, agriculture, bio-economy, health, transport, safety and security, quantum computing, the role of regions and cities, and energy were all debated through dedicated sessions.

Advanced materials, competitive economy
The latter – energy – was the focus of Cefic’s co-organised Breakfast debate entitled ‘Advanced materials and breakthrough opportunities for the energy transition’ on 8 December. Dedicated to how the chemical industry can contribute to enabling Europe make the transition to a competitive, sustainable low-carbon economy through innovation, the session was hosted by MEP Professor Jerzy Buzek with presentations from key policy makers and industry representatives including Cefic Executive Director for Research and Innovation Pierre Barthélemy.

Introducing the debate Prof. Buzek stressed the need for an innovative leap, in which development of advanced material would be very important, to enable change in the way we make and use energy.  Rudolph Strohmeier, Deputy Director General at the European Commission’s DG for Research and Innovation (below) agreed describing the Commission’s “two-sided approach with the Energy Union and SET plan and the Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) initiative - that includes advanced materials - to achieve a real energy revolution.”

Pierre Barthélemy highlighted the chemical industry’s responsibility to contribute to energy issues along the entire value chain and called for further EU support for technology development activities but also for the deployment of novel technologies. For example, central talking points included the chemical industry’s role in providing lightweight materials offering improved energy efficiency for the transport, construction and industry sectors described by Christian Collette of Arkema. While advanced materials for key energy technologies, such as energy storage, solar cells and wind turbines, and new materials for carbon capture and use as fuels or chemical energy storage were highlighted by Peter Nagler of Evonik.

The debate went well beyond advanced materials, turning to wider energy-related concerns, as Cefic Innovation Manager and SusChem Secretary Jacques Kormorniki illuminates: “There were excellent statements and discussions around the topic of energy during the Breakfast debate. This aligns with what we try to do in the SET-Plan and SusChem’s Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda – to have a global view of the energy issues.”

For example Martin Winter from Clariant claimed that advances in chemical catalysis to 2050, particularly for the synthesis of ammonia, could save energy equivalent to the current consumption of Germany and boost the global fight against hunger.

A Pact for Innovation
Although highly diverse, all the sessions and subjects were linked by the common goal of providing an environment in which Europe’s young innovators can be creative, expand their businesses and compete in the global economy. And nowhere was this theme more evident than in the official launch of the Pact for Innovation (INPACT) during the Summit’s opening ceremony on 7 December.

INPACT aims to create a space for innovation stakeholders and European institutions to meet and collaborate, in order to tackle key issues at the local, national and regional levels that hinder excellence in innovation. In essence, it will provide platforms for Europe’s innovators in all sectors to communicate with policy makers in a meaningful way.

Further, the Pact will focus on introducing and optimising favourable conditions for innovators to operate in and will lay the foundations for the next generation to be able to take risks. “A stronger EU-wide commitment is needed, and that’s why we’ve come forward with this Pact for Innovation, not just another reformulation of the overall [innovation] strategy between the key European institutions – we strive for a stronger, less institution-centric and firmer dialogue with all stakeholders,” stated Lambert van Nistelrooij, Chair, K4I Forum Governing Board, during his address.

The launch of INPACT was warmly welcomed by European Commissioner for Research Carlos Moedas at the opening ceremony (see box below).

Open Innovation 2.0
Offering a basis for INPACT to succeed, another strong theme pervading the conference was Open Innovation 2.0. Based on a Quadruple Helix Model, involving government, industry, academia and civil stakeholders, Open Innovation 2.0 calls for all actors to co-create the future through networking, collaboration, corporate entrepreneurship, proactive intellectual property management and R&D.

 “To use an analogy, we need multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary models of innovation with all stakeholders, all disciplines, all levels of technology readiness in a boiling kettle with the public authorities providing the kettle, the fire and ensuring the soup has all the right ingredients,” explains Bror Salmelin, Innovation Systems Adviser at the European Commission, DG CONNECT, and co-creator of the Open Innovation 2.0 paradigm. “And then we have the chefs who know how to cook it and how to grab onto the results – these are entrepreneurs, large or small.”

“Innovation is not a linear process any more, it is not science-based excellence, it’s about creating a lot of collisions, igniting new ideas that can be prototyped in a real-world setting very quickly, with the end-user there to say what is working and not,” Salmelin concludes.

Enabling innovators to innovate
Key to a meaningful dialogue between Europe’s innovators and policy makers, and introducing Open Innovation 2.0 to the current and next generation of innovators, will be engaging youth.

A number of young innovators were in attendance at 7EIS to offer their perspective of the innovation environment in Europe. During the parallel session ‘The next generation: mobility, jobs and entrepreneurship’, policy makers, academics and entrepreneurs shared their experiences with an eclectic crowd, including Govinda Upadhyay, 2015 EIT CHANGE award winner and founder of educational solar LED lamp startup LED safari. “It’s really good to see how people are working in the innovation direction at the European Union level, but I wish that this could be on a much more grand scale,” he explained after the session. “I am sure that if the policy makers took more initiative for young entrepreneurs in terms of market, funding, really encouraging them, it would be very beneficial.”

Another speaker at the session Tobias Bahnemann, co-founder of groundbreaking 3D sensor startup Toposens, shared Upadhyay’s tentatively positive sentiment: “The policy makers are listening to the problems and wishes of young entrepreneurs here definitely, but we will have to wait a few years to see if any changes have been made as a result.”

Support for the innovators

But perhaps entrepreneurs will not have to wait so long: “I would like to see Europe go further and faster towards open innovation,” stated European Commissioner Carlos Moedas in his foreword to the 7EIS programme.

During his speech at the Summit’s opening ceremony, Moedas went on to outline how he wishes to achieve a better innovation ecosystem. He explained how INPACT aligns perfectly with his idea of building a European Innovation Council to support innovators in the same way that the European Research Council boosts scientific discovery: “I was looking at the Pact for Innovation and I saw four key words that I think are essential […]. The first is careers, the second is refocus, the third is citizens and the fourth is future [… ]. Careers, yes: we have to streamline instruments, we have to get people in Europe to know where to go when they come to us. Refocus, yes: the European Innovation Council is all about refocus[ing]. Citizens, yes: it’s about how you get these new innovators to get on board. And the last point, future generation: […] how you transform curricula from a very young age to the Master’s level. And all this is about how you can get a bottom-up experience for innovators.”

“I would like to see Europe go further and faster towards open innovation,” – Carlos Moedas

Taking a Leaf out of Nature’s Book

Mimicking photosynthesis may be the key to unlocking a future energy scene dominated by renewables. But nature’s simple process still holds many secrets. In light of the high-level Cefic breakfast debate on advanced materials and energy challenges that took place at the 7th European Innovation Summit, we asked science writer Ben Skuse to delve into how breakthroughs in materials may help resign fossil fuels to the past through the development of novel technologies and perhaps – eventually – artificial leaves.

The development of novel processes using waste carbon dioxide - up to and including the ultimate goal of artificial photosynthesis - feature in the SusChem Innovation and Research Agenda. 


Photosynthesis is a wonder of nature. It transforms energy from the light that the Sun bathes the Earth in to energy‐rich sugars. Simply put, it takes carbon dioxide and water, and converts them to glucose and oxygen.

There are two stages to this process. The first – water splitting – converts water into oxygen and a protein. In the next step, the protein reacts with CO2 to produce biomass. So far, scientists have only managed to master the former, splitting water using electrolytic processes to create hydrogen gas instead of biomass. But even on its own this feat was a huge achievement, paving the way for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles being actively commercialised today by the likes of Daimler and Toyota, and for the power industry taking hydrogen energy storage seriously as an option to deal with intermittent renewable power generation.

Hydrogen has some limitations
While hydrogen has one of the highest energy densities of any fuel, it is also the lightest of all elements. This means its storage requires very large volumes or very high pressures, resulting in issues of safety. Furthermore, the high cost of developing infrastructure and the energy intensity of the water splitting process offer sceptics a strong argument that hydrogen may not be the future for energy storage or the automotive industry.

“Hydrogen has some limitations,” confirms Sophie Wilmet, Cefic Innovation Manager. Sophie believes CO2 conversion technologies might provide a good alternative for large-scale storage of renewable energy using existing infrastructure. “CO2 can be used to address the energy storage challenge brought about by the rise in renewables, as well as for alternative fuels for transport.”

Carbon as a resource
Although not using direct photoconversion of CO2, a number of technologies are being actively explored to transform CO2 from a reviled waste product to a useful resource, as Sophie explains: “From CO2 you can produce basic and added-value chemicals”.

For example, a process co-developed by RWTH Aachen University and Covestro, formerly Bayer MaterialScience, has led to the construction of a plant that will be opened in 2016 in Dormagen, Germany, capable of producing up to 5000 metric tons per year of polyols, a polyurethane intermediate. About 20% of the content of the polyols will be from waste CO2 captured from a nearby ammonia plant, with the final material a flexible foam for mattresses.

Another innovator is Icelandic company Carbon Recycling International (CRI), whose renewable methanol reduces carbon emissions by more than 90% compared to fossil fuels. The fuel is produced from CO2 and hydrogen that comes from renewable sources of electricity. The world's first liquid renewable transport fuel production facility from non-biological sources of energy, CRI has a 4000 metric ton per year production capacity.

Further novel ideas include using large volumes of waste CO2 from industrial processes to produce syngas (BASF);  converting waste gases from iron and steel mills into ethanol and other important chemicals, such as acetic acid, acetone, isopropanol, n-butanol or 2,3 butanediol (Siemens/LanzaTech); and creating a closed carbon cycle using renewable energy, CO2 and water to provide sustainable fuels for vehicles and decentralised electricity generation (sunfire).

Mimicking nature
Capable of absorbing CO2 at the very low concentrations (400 parts per million) found in the air, absorbing energy from low-photon count sunlight, and photosynthetic cell self-repair, the ‘technology’ within plants is far more advanced than anything devised by humankind so far.
However, with aeons to perfect the technique, it comes as something of a surprise that energy conversion in plants is not actually particularly efficient: “For most plants the photosynthetic and storage efficiency is an average of 1%,” explains Dr Junwang Tang, Reader in Energy from University College London, UK.  Why is photosynthesis so inefficient? “The natural process is capable of utilising 100% of photons but green plants give up that potential to protect themselves – nature doesn’t need so much energy.”

As a result, if society were to mimic photosynthesis unaltered, there would not be enough land on Earth to cycle the carbon required for a sustainable future. Instead, researchers are aiming to enhance the process from a number of angles. “We have learnt how nature stores CO2 and we have realised that we can probably do better,” exclaims Junwang.

Direct photoconversion
A major roadblock in developing such technology is finding photocatalysts that can absorb as much of the solar spectrum as possible while still being efficient. As plants only use a fraction of the visible range, great potential lies in the untapped electromagnetic spectrum, so photocatalysts that respond to different regions are being investigated. Other researchers are exploring doping, nanomaterials and co-catalyst surface-loading to improve the photocatalytic response of promising materials.

However, with numerous other hurdles to climb before real-world application, Sophie expects there to be a long wait before artificial leaves are realised: “It still requires development in terms of new concepts, designs of photoelectrodes and integration of the system,” she explains. “For Cefic, it’s part of our overall long-term strategy, but more like a second- or third-generation technology that will not have impact by 2020.”

Even though tangible impact from direct photoconversion seems a long way off, Europe’s competitors are keen to advance the state of the art now, with a number of multi-million Euro projects funded in Japan, a Joint Centre for Artificial Photosynthesis set up in the US and well-funded initiatives in many other parts of the world.

As a result, Junwang believes Europe’s highly able yet currently fragmented and small community of scientists working in the area needs to be brought together: “Europe is very strong in fundamental understanding of artificial and natural photosynthesis, but countries like Japan, USA and China are investing heavily in this technology through well-funded projects. If we don’t invest more – just like has happened with graphene – other countries will heavily patent the field.”

The Cefic breakfast debate
The Cefic breakfast debate took place at the 7th European Innovation Summit in the European Parliament on 8 December. The event was hosted by Jerzy Buzek, MEP and covered the wide-ranging topic of 'Advanced Materials and breakthrough opportunities for the energy transition’.