Part of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, John Rogers is leading a research group focused on flexible electronics:

“We seek to understand and exploit interesting characteristics of ‘soft’ materials, such as polymers, liquid crystals, and biological tissues as well as hybrid combinations of them with unusual classes of micro/nanomaterials, in the form of ribbons, wires, membranes, tubes or related.”

What is most interesting is that this technology is apparently the foundation tech that the Vancouver startup CoolEdge Lighting is planning on somehow commercializing.  According to a recent CoolEdge press release:

“Cooledge Lighting Inc. is a Canadian based venture capital backed company focused on the introduction of MicroLED based lighting.  The company’s innovative work is based on the original research by John Rogers and the University of Illinois.  Cooledge Lighting’s unique technology will change the way lighting is applied to space by blurring the line between lighting equipment and the architectural space.”

Going forward into the future, it will be interesting to see if using semi-conductor fab-based technologies will scale to a low-enough cost to make this type of product competitive with flexible OLED.