Partnering has proved to be a successful, absolutely necessary approach for printed electronics. Since no single company or research institute has expertise on the entire supply chain, pooling together the knowledge and resources of a large number of companies is leading to successful collaborations.

Such is the case with PrintoCent. Headquartered in Oulu, Finland, PrintoCent is an international consortium led by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and also works inline with the University of Oulu, Oulu University of Applied Sciences and Business Oulu, who have streamlined their efforts in printed intelligence for industrialization and commercialization.

PrintoCent has access to five installed manufacturing lines with full-time operators, and provides a world-class design, development and manufacturing environment with special focus on roll-to-roll and hybrid manufacturing.

There are 35 companies currently partnering with PrintoCent, and that number is growing. The number of start-ups that have emerged from PrintoCent since its beginnings in 2009 is also expanding. To date, there are more than 15 companies that have spun out of PrintoCent.

PrintoCent’s director is Ilkka Kaisto, who also serves as director of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Printed Functional Solutions. Kaisto noted that the Oulu regin is well renowned for its electronics expertise, and printed electronics offers an opportunity to utilize this knowledge.

“In the Oulu region, the electronics manufacturing was moving to Asia,” Kaisto said. “Since 2005 about 5,000 people have come out from the Nokia cluster, and they have been looking for new opportunities. From Oulu’s regional point of view, as VTT had a strong push from 2006 (50 persons) to 2009 (100 persons) for Printed Intelligence, and Oulu-based universities were willing to cooperate, it was an opportunity to invest to this new printed roll-to-roll manufacturing technology and thus to speed up the commercialization and industrialization.

“Printed intelligence/electronics and optical measurement technologies were chosen in 2008 as one of the regional strategic development topics,” Kaisto added. “So, we do have an excellent resource pool for printed intelligence/electronics design, development and manufacturing in the people having the industrial experience of the mobile phone and ICT industry.

Kaisto said that the first step for PrintoCent was to build up a unique infrastructure for roll-to-roll manufacturing technologies and create demonstrators to test the maturity of the technology.

Once that was completed in 2012, PrintoCent’s next effort is to utilize the infrastructure, gather together the PrintoCent Industrial Cluster and realize product concepts/market trials first for niche small series, and then to prove the ability of the scale-up of the roll-to-roll manufacturing technology – and bring it into commercialization by 2016.


Ilkka noted that PrintoCent has achieved some innovations, and added that there have been 18 start-ups to come out of the program, including consortium members TactoTek, Detemex, FocalSpec, Goodwiller Oy, Nanordic.com, Iscent, Neficon and The Active Paper Company.

“Currently, there are more than 200 experts working in the PrintoCent community, which comprises companies, start-ups/business cases in training/accelerator phase, universities and research institutes,” Kaisto said. “PrintoCent’s project-based operations are jointly developed and implemented, with the overall program being coordinated by VTT. There is a strong development phase ongoing in the companies in PrintoCent Cluster, and hopefully some of them will come out with their products in 2014.”

PrintoCent has put together an impressive array of members, ranging from micro and start-up companies to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large-scale enterprises (LSEs). Among the members are Coatema, Beneq, Canatu, Asahi Kasei, Asys Group, BASF, DNP, Bosch, Corning, Metso, Merck and Toyo Ink. For its members, Printo Cent offers companies the opportunity to collaborate on products with experts in a wide variety of disciplines.

Ynvisible is one of the recent companies to join PrintoCent. Headquartered in Portugal, Ynvisible has successfully developed and integrated innovative electrochromic displays using patented novel functional inks into a wide range of materials.

“There is rapidly growing demand for our printed interactive solutions,” Jani-Mikael Kuusisto, chief business development officer at Ynvisible, said. “We continue to take rapid steps to upscale both the production of not only the electrochromic displays, but also the integrated systems, all the way through to final product integration.

“In the spirit of open innovation and to address current demand, we have already been collaborating actively with several companies, research institutions and universities,” Kuusisto added. “Some of our partners are already members in PrintoCent, and some of our customers and many other high profile companies are also connected to this network through other means.”

In addition to the value of networking and finding common platforms for scaling to production of final products, Kuusisto said that Ynvisible sees value in having access to PrintoCent’s equipment, facilities and pool of experienced printed intelligence professionals.

“As a small company, we aim to do much of our experimental work in research and pilot facilities,” Kuusisto said. “This reduces our risks in making capital investments into equipment that we may not ultimately need or have very little use for. The PrintoCent facilities have evolved over more than 10 years, and based on earlier experiences.

“This same expertise accumulated within PrintoCent can help our company save time and money, as we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and repeat all of the earlier mistakes,” he added. “Many people involved in PrintoCent have several years of experience in taking production of novel printed systems from lab into volume production of final products. Through our participation in PrintoCent, we expect rapid results as we begin to scale up our business.”

Kaisto anticipated that PrintoCent’s projects appear in market trials by 2015, with mass commercialization coming soon after.

“The PrintoCent cluster will create and produce first market trials 2015, which will support and speed up companies’ trust to take these technologies in their next generation products,” Kaisto noted. “It is also crucial to get industrial designers involved to adopt the form factors – light, transparent, flexible, bendable etc. – combined with new type of functionalities in indoor energy production, integrated lighting, autonomous sensoring, disposable printed diagnostics, etc.

“This will first take place in niche, small serial applications, but it is predicted that there will be a strong growth in the whole value chain from design-development-manufacturing with quality control processes for mass applications within the next three years,” Kaisto concluded.