The OE-A published the 10th edition of its Roadmap for Flexible and Printed Electronics on 22 April 2026 — around 300 pages, assembled with input from more than 100 experts across industry and research. Roadmaps are not usually news. This one carries a structural change that is: defence and aerospace is treated as a separate industry sector for the first time, sitting alongside automotive, consumer electronics, healthcare, printing and packaging, smart buildings and the Internet of Things.

Two other additions arrive in the same edition. Sustainability, previously distributed through the document, now has a standalone chapter titled "Sustainability & Green Electronics". And there is a new section on fuel cells, alongside expanded treatment of the enabling and core technology clusters — functional and substrate materials, printing and patterning, assembly, testing and standardisation, design and simulation.

"Flexible and printed electronics is established in numerous markets," said Dr Klaus Hecker, OE-A's managing director, on publication. "The new edition of the OE-A Roadmap clearly shows where the technology and applications stand today and which next steps are crucial for further scaling."

Why a separate defence chapter is the interesting part

OE-A frames the addition around robust, safety-critical and specialised applications. That is the polite version. The blunter reading is that European defence and aerospace budgets have moved, and an industry association that spent two decades explaining why printed electronics belongs in packaging and consumer goods has noticed where procurement money is now available.

The technical fit is real enough, and it is not a stretch. The properties printed electronics has always led with — conformal, thin, light, large-area, integrable into a structure rather than bolted onto it — are ones aerospace has wanted for a long time and has generally been unable to buy at an acceptable qualification standard. Structural health monitoring across a wing skin, conformal antennas that follow a fuselage curve, printed heaters for de-icing: none of these are new ideas, and all of them have been demonstrated.

The properties printed electronics has always led with are ones aerospace has wanted for a long time and has generally been unable to buy at an acceptable qualification standard.

What has historically blocked them is not capability but qualification. Aerospace and defence want documented lifetime behaviour, traceable materials and process control tight enough to survive an airworthiness argument — the same barrier, in a harsher form, that we described in our reporting on encapsulation and barrier films, where the gap between a working device and a qualified one is measured in years of test data.

The tension with the sustainability chapter

It is worth sitting with the fact that both additions landed in the same edition. A roadmap that promotes green electronics as a central design criterion while opening a defence and aerospace sector is holding two goals that do not obviously reconcile, and the association has not, in its announcement, attempted to reconcile them.

There is a narrower version where they do fit: lighter aircraft consume less fuel, and printed structural electronics genuinely removes mass. Whether the roadmap makes that argument, or simply places the two chapters side by side, is not something the announcement reveals.

The honest caveats

We have not read the roadmap. It is free to OE-A members and sold to non-members, and this article is based on the association's published announcement and the trade coverage of it — so what we can tell you is the document's structure and stated scope, not the substance of its forecasts. Where you see a claim about what the defence chapter argues, that is our reading of why the sector was added, not a summary of its contents.

The page count also varies by source. OE-A's own announcement says 300 pages; some trade write-ups say 310. It is a trivial discrepancy, but it is a reminder that most coverage of a document like this — including, in part, ours — is coverage of a press release.

More fundamentally, a roadmap is a consensus document produced by an industry association from the contributions of its own members. It describes what a large group of interested companies collectively expects and hopes to build. That is genuinely useful information about industry intent. It is not a market forecast, and the ten-edition series is long enough now that the more interesting exercise is checking the older editions against what actually happened.

What we're watching

  • Whether qualification work follows — a chapter is cheap; aerospace test programmes are not. Named qualification partnerships would be the real signal.
  • How the sustainability chapter is applied — whether it sets criteria the rest of the document is measured against, or sits alongside it.
  • The fuel-cell section — a new addition in a roadmap that has historically treated energy as a storage problem rather than a generation one.