Today’s economy is a very dynamic and pressing environment. Companies are constantly looking for ways to improve the performance and/or lower costs of their existing products. In addition to that, most companies are looking for disruptive technologies to put their business apart from competition. With that,innovation is key to the survival and growth of all companies.

Recent studies show that nearly 70% of product innovation relates back to the development of new materials or to the combination of existing materials in a new fashion [1]. The problem lies in the fact that materials innovation today is very inefficient, especially the adoption of new materials. Developing and certifying new materials is a very long and expensive endeavor. Part of that is due to extensive physical testing requirements. And those physical testing are necessary today because in many cases engineers do not understand well enough how these new materials fail.

An efficient way to minimize the amount of required physical testing is by the use of computer simulation. However, traditional simulation technology was not made for complex multiscale multi-phase materials. Materials innovation usually occurs at the microscale level, by fine tuning properties of individual constituents, by changing their formulation or by reinforcing specific constituents with nanoparticles or fibers - so they are multi-phase materials. Another very important factor is that the weakness of materials lies in existing manufacturing induced defects - and those defects are usually only noticeable at the microscale level. The material’s microstructure is therefore its DNA.