Created in 2005 in the Rhône-Alpes region of France, Axelera is the French cluster at the crossroads of the chemical and environmental sectors. Axelera is recognised as an « Innovative project factory.” Economically, this region is ranked second in France (7th in Europe) and is also known as the first chemical production region in France. Axelera is committed to developing sustainable, efficient, circular, and clean solutions for industry.
Axelera’s network of 370 members gathers expertise in:
- Materials, chemicals, equipment, and system manufacturing
- Equipment and systems manufacturing and integration
- Process engineering, energy and resource efficiency, and regulatory compliance
- Recycling/reuse of various industrial by-products and end-of-life products
- Water, air, and soil depollution
- Renewable raw materials
- Digitalisation of industry
Two-thirds of Axelera’s members are companies from start-ups to large multinationals, and one-third are RTOs and universities. Beyond its members, Axelera builds strong relationships with other innovative research institutes and Clusters across Europe, which facilitates technology transfer, dissemination, and networking for its members’ projects. At last count, more than 350 R&D projects have been matured and/or certified by Axelera yielding public funds of 1.5 Md€ global budget. Axelera’s governance is ensured by a board of nine representatives from large industry (ENGIE, SOLVAY, SUEZ), SMEs (INEVO Technologies, INOVEO, CONDAT) and RTOs/UNIs (INSA, IFPEN, Uni. Lyon) who help ensure the development of the cluster’s network and activities.
In terms of dissemination and networking, Axelera links innovators and companies, and helps them to communicate effectively across sectors and build new relationships. Axelera organizes a dozen workshops and panel talks annually, and prepares several networking events each year (brokerages, speed-dating, etc.). The Axelera Invest Club helps its members to attract private investments.
In terms of strategic intelligence, Axelera disseminates strategic information to its member network via emails, the Axelera Application for smart phones and thematic workshops. The team has been awarded the « Cluster Management Excellence Label GOLD » of the European Cluster Excellence Initiative which acknowledges 101 clusters in Europe that demonstrate sophisticated management and high impacts.
In the BlackCycle project, Axelera is the work package leader of WP3 – Dissemination, communication, exploitation, and strategic intelligence which involves the entire consortium. The objective of the WP3 is to provide a robust mechanism for the dissemination and communication of the BlackCycle project activities and results. WP3 promotes the BlackCycle project and results as widely and as effectively as possible to all the relevant stakeholders, scientific publications and media and the general European public and citizens. In WP3, Axelera gather information and data about competing technologies, complementary initiatives, relevant meetings, markets, and interesting potential end-users to convert this information and data into actionable intelligence to enrich strategic and managerial decisions (risk management, deliverable scoping, project reporting). Two strategic intelligence bulletins and three newsletters have been published so far. Axelera has also prepared the logo and visual identity of the project as well as the public website of the BlackCycle project available at https://blackcycle-project.eu/. The website is monthly updated with relevant, public content from the intelligence bulletins, project results, upcoming events, etc. A project flyer has also been published by Axelera in an electronic version, which each partner can print to support their dissemination and communication activities (https://blackcycle-project.eu/media/).