The GRAPHERGIA consortium is not only made up of researchers, but also SMEs. Meet AUSTRALO Marketing Lab, a Spanish SME responsible for the communication, dissemination, and exploitation work of GRAPHERGIA, gathered in the Work Package 7 (WP7), led by Mona Marill, Project Manager at AUSTRALO since 2020. She leads especially the exploitation work of the project, supported by the second team member, Laura Argilés, Marketing Manager focused on the communication and dissemination activities.
With over 10 years of experience in European projects, this is Mona’s first research and innovation project related to graphene applications. She feels thrilled to start discovering an entirely new topic for herself and AUSTRALO, since their background is strongly in digital research and innovation. This makes her especially interested in better understanding the European and international ecosystems around graphene innovation.
Keep reading this interview to discover more about AUSTRALO’s activities in GRAPHERGIA, spreading the project’s innovation to varied stakeholders, and for further uptake of the advanced material innovation markets!
Why did you join the GRAPHERGIA project?
Our company has strong expertise in implementing European projects in very different sectors, and we have a pivotal role between the European innovators and researchers and the target markets of the developed novel solutions. Therefore, we bring our know-how of European projects into the GRAPHERGIA consortium, especially in terms of communication, dissemination, and exploitation of the achievements.
On the other hand, we wanted to join the project and work with this excellent group of researchers and innovators in graphene, next-generation batteries, and smart textiles. We believe this collaboration will enable us to gain strategic knowledge and work on our company’s marketing methodologies on this novel topic. Secondly, GRAPHERGIA opens us new opportunities to tie new connections with innovators and drivers in advanced materials ecosystems, especially in the framework of the Graphene Flagship Initiative.
What does your organisation bring to the project? Can you describe your role in GRAPHERGIA?
We support the project’s partners, including companies and researchers, by promoting their ongoing research work and results, which we implement with tailored marketing strategies. With our graphic designers’ team, we have created a visual identity and a brand that helps the stakeholders quickly and easily understand the project’s essence. We regularly post new blog posts about the project’s progress and team, information on scientific publications, and related events on the GRAPHERGIA website. We also manage the project’s social media channels on LinkedIn, X and Youtube, and for these, we have established a solid strategy with clear objectives in terms of online community building and content creation. In addition, we produce varied promotional materials, including flyers, a roll-up, etc., that the partners can use for their own communication while attending different events. Moreover, during the second year of the project, our aim is to create more audiovisual content, including videos and a podcast series, such as this one:
Regarding disseminating the GRAPHERGIA results, we support our partners in spreading the research results, including public deliverables and scientific publications, in open access. For this, we have created an open virtual library on Zenodo. We also scout relevant global stakeholder events where the GRAPHERGIA partners could present the project progress and results. The first major event in this first project year was the Graphene Week 2024, hosted last October in Prague, Czech Republic, where GRAPHERGIA offered a joint workshop with a sister project, also developing novel solutions for graphene-empowered energy, ARMS.
Finally, regarding the exploitation of the project results beyond the project duration, we support partners in identifying their business opportunities and scaling their innovation from lab to market. Moreover, starting from the present technology readiness level (TRL) of 3-4, the consortium delves into innovative concepts for 2D materials engineering and integration at TRL 5 or higher, establishing versatile pilot-scale-based approaches for these two application categories. In parallel, in the project, we study the intellectual property aspects of the developed innovations, looking into potential resulting patents.
What expectations do you have for the project from your personal/organisational perspective?
I know that GRAPHERGIA will foster my EU project’s know-how, opening an entirely new research and innovation area in graphene applied to harvest and store energy. This 3.5-year project is ambitious in proposing novel energy harvesting and storage solutions. I look forward to seeing these innovative concepts being brought to real demo cases and working on potential exploitation plans. The idea of having a T-shirt using my body’s energy to run connected sensors that could monitor my health data seems a bit futuristic still, and I am eager to see how GRAPHERGIA tackles these challenges with its all-in-one self-charging textile demo case!
Which impact will GRAPHERGIA have on industry and society in the short and long term?
One of the key activities that I lead in the project is stakeholder engagement, for which we have created the GRAPHERGIA Hub, aiming at scouting and interacting with different target groups, such as researchers, industry representatives, SMEs, academic organisations, etc., to promote their project activities and to ensure that our results can benefit related initiatives. In this sense, I see that one of the very visible short-term impacts of the project is the continuous contribution to the growing ecosystem of innovators and researchers working on graphene-related projects for the energy sector. The Graphene Flagship Initiative, an EU-funded coordination and support action, is especially a crucial cluster for GRAPHERGIA in disseminating the project’s opportunities and tangible results and, even more importantly, creating synergies for joint research and innovation activities. Together, the clustered graphene-related research and innovation projects can greatly impact the future of graphene implementation in different sectors!
How do you see the power of graphene materials transforming the European energy markets? What benefits can it bring to science, economy and society in general?
From GRAPHERGIA’s focus point, it is certain that the energy harvesting and storage sector is one of the major markets benefiting from advanced material technologies. However, I see that the added value of the GRAPHERGIA’s innovation stands in the junction of graphene, smart textile and battery markets. The challenge is to not only create innovative pilot lines for graphene-enabled energy harvesting but also put in place sustainable methods that fit the Green Deal policies, and hence the European environmental and societal interests.