Scientific targets of the planned project are synthesis, characterization and application of NIR absorbing and emitting organic materials for Organic Electronics. NIR sensitive absorbers show a great potential for the development of a new generation of printable photodetectors with tuneable sensitivity windows that may be integrated into multifunctional devices for chemical/biological sensing or optical communication. The novel devices may result in lower costs, and they could be used for the construction of large, flexible sensors. NIR emitting OLEDs also gained growing attention because of potential applications in information processing and night-vision readable displays.The consortium can look back to very promising exploratory work on the generation of novel NIR absorbing “low bandgap” copolymers and their application in organic solar cells of the bulk heterojunction type, bulk heterojunction-type organic solar cells containing “low bandgap” organic materials as sensitizing components and on NIR OLEDs based on “low bandgap” copolymers or oligomers.The consortium aims to train PhD students in this very interdisciplinary field (chemistry, physics, materials science) in a close and fruitful collaboration between academic institutions and industry. The consortium is well-placed around leading academic groups in materials science (please see: http://www.sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/misc/Top100MatSci2000-10/) and important industrial players/manufacturers (ADVENT, Siemens, NikkoIA) and will condition young European scientists for the needs of the next decades.