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With industrial research increasingly under pressure to produce rapid profits, and universities rightly concerned with primary research, can university spin-off companies fill the gap between invention and commercialization?
Richard Friend has co-founded two companies based on his work on organic electronics whilst maintainting a thriving research career at Cambridge University. Nature Materials talked to him about combining business with academia.
The material used for the dielectric layer in organic field-effect transistors strongly affects the efficiencies of the resulting devices. The reasons behind this connection, and opportunities to tune the device performance by changing the dielectric material, are now revealed.
Although computational methods are generating a bewildering number of hypothetical zeolite structures, the selection of candidates for synthesis remains problematic. The presence of a flexibility window in the structure may turn out to be a useful criterion.
The discovery that the rotation of the orbital arrangement in manganites induces ferroelectricity exposes an intriguing phase transition that could serve as a blueprint for novel applications.