CENTRE FOR PROCESS INNOVATION LIMITED LBG

Their core work

CPI is a UK-based process innovation centre that bridges the gap between laboratory research and full-scale manufacturing. They specialize in scaling up advanced materials — particularly printed and flexible electronics, nano-inks, and functional coatings — through pilot production lines and test beds. CPI also provides formulation manufacturing expertise across sectors from pharmaceuticals to food, helping companies and research teams turn promising chemistries into manufacturable products. Their work consistently focuses on the industrialization challenge: taking a material or process that works in the lab and proving it can work at production scale.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

CPI's early H2020 work (2014–2018) was heavily anchored in printed electronics industrialization — OLEDs, flexible displays, photonics, and automotive electronics applications, with projects like PI-SCALE, InSCOPE, and NECOMADA building pilot lines for these technologies. From 2019 onward, their focus broadened significantly: sustainability themes emerged strongly (wastewater recycling, bio-based materials, closed-loop processes), while their electronics expertise shifted toward embedded and structural electronics with real-world applications like smart batteries (ALBATROSS) and pharmaceutical monitoring sensors (RealHOPE). The evolution shows a clear trajectory from pure electronics manufacturing scale-up toward applying those capabilities in sustainability-driven and cross-sector contexts.

CPI is moving from being a printed electronics scale-up facility toward becoming a broader sustainability-oriented advanced materials innovation centre, applying its manufacturing know-how to circular economy, battery technology, and pharma challenges.

How they like to work

CPI overwhelmingly operates as a partner rather than a leader — coordinating only 2 of 18 projects while contributing specialist capabilities to 16 others. With 252 unique consortium partners across 28 countries, they function as a highly connected hub rather than a repeat-partner organization, bringing pilot-scale manufacturing infrastructure that many consortia need but few partners can offer. Their strong preference for Innovation Actions (11 of 18 projects) over pure Research Actions confirms they are sought after for the scale-up and demonstration phase, not early-stage research.

CPI has built an exceptionally broad European network of 252 unique partners across 28 countries, making them one of the most connected organizations in the UK's H2020 landscape. Their partnerships span academia, industry, and other innovation centres across nearly all EU member states.

What sets them apart

CPI occupies a rare position as a catapult-style innovation centre that owns and operates open-access pilot production lines — most research centres publish papers, but CPI actually runs manufacturing equipment at pre-commercial scale. Their combination of nano-materials expertise with operational pilot facilities means they can take a partner's lab-proven material and produce enough of it to validate a business case. For consortium builders, CPI solves the classic "valley of death" problem: they provide the physical infrastructure and process engineering to move from TRL 4-5 to TRL 6-7.

Highlights from their portfolio

• NECOMADA
  CPI's largest project (EUR 2.1M) and one of only two they coordinated — focused on accelerating nano-enabled conducting materials from lab to market applications.
• LEE-BED
  EUR 1.5M innovation test bed combining printed electronics with nanomaterials for lightweight embedded electronics — represents CPI's core mission of bridging materials science and manufacturing.
• Waste2Fresh
  EUR 1.35M project applying CPI's process expertise to wastewater recycling in textiles — signals their strategic expansion into circular economy and sustainability.