Catalisti's Innovation Roadmap

Context perspective

The context perspective of the Catalisti innovation roadmap captures the external forces shaping the future of the chemical and plastics industry in Flanders. It is built around one central mission: supporting a sustainable, competitive and resilient industry.

Today’s challenging context is fuelling Catalisti’s innovation and collaboration efforts. Increasing energy costs, global competition, complex EU and national regulations, and a weak demand for EU products are putting industrial companies under pressure. In addition, companies are facing a range of socio-environmental challenges to which they must respond. Innovative molecules, processes, products, and business models will help the chemical and plastics industry address with these challenges and will create economic and socio-environmental value. Four drivers reflect the most decisive innovation forces shaping the sector today. Together, these four interconnected drivers define the context perspective of the Catalisti innovation roadmap.

Innovation starts with Answering to changing demands from markets and consumers, as technologies only scale when there is a clear market pull and a convincing business case. However, a strong market position can only be maintained if the sector succeeds in Boosting productivity growth, ensuring that new solutions improve efficiency and strengthen competitiveness. Digital tools play an important enabling role in this regard, helping companies accelerate efficiency gains, increase productivity and reduce costs.

In parallel, Moving towards a circular economy challenges companies to rethink how materials are sourced, used and recovered, linking design, production and end-of-life choices. Finally, Transitioning towards climate neutrality ensures that innovation contributes to long-term societal value and strengthens the sector’s license to operate.

Together, these four interconnected drivers define the context perspective of the Catalisti innovation roadmap. By clearly naming them, the roadmap creates a shared language for companies, researchers and policymakers. It enables every innovation project to ask which driver it addresses and how it contributes to the overarching mission. In this way, the context perspective turns a complex and demanding environment into a clear, actionable framework for innovation choices.

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Cluster perspective

The cluster perspective of the Catalisti innovation roadmap focuses on how Catalisti creates additional leverage for its members and the wider innovation ecosystem. As innovation cluster, Catalisti focuses its efforts to stimulate collaboration and accelerate innovation across the cluster, intervening where coordination failures are greatest. So, innovation can flow faster and farther across the entire ecosystem.

Through Brokering innovation projects and trajectories, ideas are guided from early project concepts towards impactful cooperative and collective innovation projects, reducing fragmentation and helping promising solutions move closer to demonstration and deployment. By Building partnerships and knowledge networks, the roadmap makes better use of the strong knowledge base within Flanders, enabling expertise, experiences and opportunities to circulate more effectively across the ecosystem.

With Strengthening start-ups and scale-ups in our ecosystem, the roadmap acknowledges that pioneers need access to partners, funding, infrastructure and industrial expertise to turn promising technologies into market-ready solutions. At the same time, Collaborating across sectors and clusters allows knowledge, technologies and solutions to spill over into adjacent industries, where new combinations and untapped opportunities can emerge. Finally, Collaborating across regions and borders connects Flemish actors to European and international networks, projects and funding streams, strengthening the cluster’s position beyond Flanders.

Together, these interconnected levers define the cluster perspective of the Catalisti innovation roadmap. They are not separate activities, but part of an integrated approach in which project brokerage, knowledge sharing, start-up support, internationalisation and inter-cluster collaboration reinforce one another. This allows Catalisti to move from ad hoc opportunities towards a more proactive and strategic way of creating impact for its members and the wider ecosystem.