A few weeks ago, I joined an online clustering event organised by the PERMANET project, bringing together EU‑funded initiatives working across the rare earth elements and permanent magnets value chain. The aim was to strengthen alignment between projects and explore opportunities for collaboration in a complex and fast‑evolving European ecosystem. This article is a personal reflection on that discussion — what felt familiar, what felt difficult, and where initiatives like REMHub can realistically contribute.
Going into the event, my expectations were mixed. On the one hand, I was eager to learn about other projects and especially happy to share with event participants what we are building at REMHub – a place to facilitate service discovery and industrial collaboration in the ecosystem. On the other hand, I knew that finding concrete ways to meaningfully collaborate was going to be difficult–everyone is already busy with their own project’s work and the added “cost” of coordinating the collaboration needs to outweigh the benefits.
A big part of the session focused on discussing the bottlenecks and opportunities in the field: what makes it difficult to ramp up the REE-PM industry in the EU and what are the enablers. This part I was looking forward to – we had already done a fair amount of work on these topics in REMHub and I was curious to see how well our thinking aligned.
As it turned out, most of the bottlenecks discussed were familiar. Economic viability came up early: how hard it still is to build business cases that survive the jump from pilot to scale, especially given existing cost pressures and global competition. Circularity followed close behind, not as a vision problem but as a practical one — design choices, costs, missing infrastructure, unclear incentives. Then there were standards, labelling, and regulation. Necessary work, slow work, often frustrating work.
None of this felt new, and that was almost the point. These are not gaps waiting for a clever platform or a single project to fill them. They are structural challenges that sit at the intersection of markets, policy, technology maturity and time. There was no sense in the room that anyone had “the solution.”
What did surface, more quietly, was something else. Across very different topics, the same friction kept appearing: things felt scattered. Projects addressing related questions without really seeing each other. Capabilities known inside consortia but not much beyond. Companies struggling to orient themselves in a landscape that is busy, but not always easy to navigate. Fragmentation was the one cross-cutting theme that surfaced, across projects, actors and value‑chain stages.
Fragmentation wasn’t framed as the problem. It doesn’t explain weak business cases or circularity gaps on its own. But it does shape how difficult those problems are to tackle together. When knowledge stays local, when lessons don’t travel well, when finding the right counterpart takes more effort than it should, progress slows — almost imperceptibly, but consistently.
In more established industrial ecosystems, a certain level of fragmentation may be inconvenient but manageable. Networks are mature, roles are clearer, and informal coordination fills some of the gaps. In an ecosystem that is still small business‑wise and finding its footing, however, fragmentation can have a much stronger effect — slowing learning, collaboration and confidence at the very moment when momentum is most needed.
This kind of fragmentation is one part of the broader landscape that our project’s digital Hub is aiming to address. We are not trying to fix the whole system at once. What we are trying to do is much narrower: reduce some of the everyday friction that fragmentation creates. Make it a bit easier to see what capabilities exist. Make it less effort to understand who does what, where, and at which stage. Help conversations that start in events like this one continue in more concrete ways afterwards.
Our aim is simple: to put some oil around the wheels of the system, so that they can start turning more easily. It’s a small part of a much bigger solution — but this part we aim to do well, with purpose and focus.
For service providers and industrial actors who recognise this friction in their own daily work and would like to engage more closely, the digital Hub in REMHub is opening up in the coming months. It is our attempt to offer a shared place where capabilities, needs and conversations in the rare earth and permanent magnet value chain can meet more easily — and where collaboration doesn’t have to start from zero every time.
If you are a service or technology provider operating in the rare earth and permanent magnets space and want to expand your reach of potential customers, contact us! We will add you to the waiting list and add your organisation profile to the Hub, already during launch preparations. “Save your spot” and ensure visibility already from launch!
If supply of rare earth permanent magnets plays a key role to your business and you want to have access to wider range of European suppliers and technology partners, you will find that on our Hub, as soon as we launch. Let us know and we’ll keep you in touch!
Written by
Sebastian Tauciuc – Development Manager, Business Design, CLIC Innovation.
In the REMHub project, Sebastian is responsible for leading the work to design, develop and launch the digital and innovation Hub, facilitating innovation and industrial collaboration in the rare earth and permanent magnets value chain.