A new collaboration between two lightweight forces
The European Lightweight Association (ELA) and the European Lightweight Clusters Alliance (ELCA) decided to join forces by signing a mutual cooperation agreement. Both organisations share the common objective of generating more visibility and market positioning of lightweighting technologies at the European level, given their enormous economic and environmental potential. In addition, to the complementary competencies of the members of this alliance, ELA focuses on customer development and strong ties to industrial users while ELCA strengths lay on fostering innovation in lightweight technologies through its resilient pan-European ecosystem, ensuring demand-oriented development and improved market penetration.
Today, ELCA and ELA represent the two largest lightweight technology communities in Europe with a growing network of more than 4,500 companies and more than 600 research institutions from 12 European countries active in lightweight technology across different sectors and industries.
This cooperation agreement was made official at the ELCA General Assembly in Dusseldorf at the K-Fair in October 2022 with Thomas Hipke from Fraunhofer and Katharina Schoeps from AMZ signing the agreement from ELCA and ELA representatives connecting and signing virtually from Stuttgart. This marks the move towards the creation of “Made in Europe” lightweight products and technologies, which can thus become a unique selling point for European stakeholders in international markets.
A note from Lena Wollbeck from ELA:
The strong focus of ELCA on R&D activities and innovation complements the strengths of ELA very well. ELCA could help ELA members by feeding the market with new ideas that improve lightweight performance while ELA could foster the market uptake and use of products coming from ELCA. In addition, both networks can join forces for improving the positioning of lightweight technologies in Brussels, with the aim of keeping them relevant in the EU policy agendas.
Watch the video to see those from both ELCA and ELA
