of Photonics Technologies: the European Perspective The Leverage Effect

The Leverage Effect of Photonics Technologies: the European Perspective
The first analysis to be made is the assessment of how the dependency
of photonics to their competitiveness of enabling manufacturing industries
will change in the coming decade. Based on the survey, the outcomes
in 2010 and 2020 are shown in the following figure.
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
2010
2020
Manufacture of
Electronics and
Optical
Equipment
Media
Production and
Broadcasting
Manufacture of
Vehicles and
Large Machinery
Printing &
Publisching
Activities
Manufacture of
Fine Chemicals
and
and
Optical Media
Equipment
Printing
Activities
Publishing &
Food
BroadcastingVehicles and
Oil Exploration Beverage Clothing
and
Production
and Gas
Textiles and
Manufacture Electronics of and Production and Manufacture of
Fine Chemicals
Large Machinery Manufacturing Pharmaceuticals of
Manufacturing of
Pharmaceuticals
Oil and Gas
Exploration
Food and
Beverage
Production
Manufacture of
Textilies and
Clothing
Figure 23: Overview of the average survey results on impact of photonic technologies to
selected manufacturing industries, comparing the LIM scores in 2010 and 2020.
It is clear that, overall, all of the photonics enabled manufacturing industries
are expected to experience a significant increase in dependency
on photonics technologies in the coming 10 years. Although the
industries where present dependency is low show the highest increase,
this is not strange because of the “room for improvement”. However,
it is perhaps more surprising that even many mature markets also show
significant increases in dependency. This contributes to the earlier conclusion
that photonics is still in its early stage of industrial evolution.
However, it is interesting to see that industries that are now not regarded
as important application areas for photonics will also show a strong
increase in importance. The two lowest enabling industries (Food/beverage
and Textile) are expected to double in LIM, which means that photonics
will shift from “marginal importance” to “intermediate importance”
to the industry. Also the other industries show a shift in nature
of dependency to photonics.
For the final markets, the most dependent ones are research, defence
and aerospace; the dependence of water supply and retail (despite the
ubiquity of laser bar code readers) was considered limited.
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