This special issue of Thin Solid Films contains selected papers presented at the Symposium L “Novel Functional Materials and Nanostructures for innovative non-volatile memory devices” of the EuropeanMaterials Research Society (E-MRS) Spring Meeting 2012, held on May 14-17 in Strasbourg, France. The Symposium was organized by Sabina Spiga (CNR-IMM-Laboratorio MDM, Agrate Brianza, Italy), Christophe Muller (IM2NP, CNRS, and Aix-Marseille Université, France), Russell Cowburn (Cambridge University, Cavendish Laboratory, UK), Heike Riel (IBM Research GmbH, Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland), and Jan Siegel (Instituto de Optica, CSIC, Madrid, Spain). Currently, the microelectronics industry faces new technological challenges to continue improving the performances of memory devices in terms of access time, storage capacity, endurance, and data retention. The main issues to overcome are the downsizing of the memory cell necessary to embed an increasing number of elementary devices and the fulfillment of increasingly aggressive specifications from applications. Regardless of the architecture, Flash technology still dominates the markets of non-volatile memories. Nevertheless, since the downscaling of the conventional floating gate appears ever more difficult below the 16 nm technological node, opportunities are opened for alternative storage devices. As a result, emerging memory concepts either evolutionary or revolutionary are being explored to satisfy the growing needs for storage capacity, while complying with drastic applicative specifications (lower power consumption, smaller form factor, longer data …