Flexible and printed electronics: building an ecosystem for commercial success

Flexible organic, inorganic, and printed electronics are not emerging markets they're enabling technologies. The market is supply-chain logistics, medical devices, photovoltaics, lighting, structural health monitoring, consumer packaged goods, toys and games, and so on. These are all of the players at this event, and each has different technical demands, distribution and support requirements, and adoption challenges. So how do companies and organizations that have such enabling or emerging technologies, competencies, and/or customers identify and address their potential markets? Especially when they're balancing the need to choose the right markets to focus on, while remaining flexible enough to change as market conditions dictate? While PARC has had a legacy of creating foundational research and evolving its competencies in this arena, we are now focused on "building an ecosystem" for flexible and printed electronics. Because simply having expertise and demonstrating feasibility alone do not a commercial reality make. We have to work together to seize the white spaces between technology opportunity, business opportunity, and market reality. The dialogue between those that understand whats needed and those that understand whats possible will enable new opportunities neither of us could have come up with alone.