What I have learnt from my technology transfer failures
Mariano Campoy, ICMAB-CSIC, Spain
Tuesday 10 February 2026, 12.00 PM
ICMAB - Sala d'Actes Carles Miravitlles
Abstract
Our group develops materials for energy applications, particularly solar cells and thermoelectric generators. In the process of our research efforts, we have invented a number of technologies that humbly thought that solved problems from different industrial sectors and thus have protected them and seek their transference into the market. The inventions relate to pieces of equipment, processing of materials, as well as novel devices. In this talk I will go through some of these inventions and tell you different strategies that we came up with in our attempts to commercialize them. Some of the strategies worked really well and now four of them are licensed to different companies and, moreover, we founded one spin-off company called Molecular Gate. The other four patents are not, and understanding what went wrong helped us to take better decisions.
Short bio
Mariano Campoy-Quiles leads a 12-15 people group at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC) that has built substantial research efforts in two application areas, solar photovoltaic (light to electric) and thermoelectric (heat to electric) energy conversion. His team uses advanced spectroscopic tools and innovative processing schemes in order to understand and develop technologies based on organic semiconductors. Campoy-Quiles is a physicist from the University of Santiago de Compostela (2000), and has been awarded a PhD in experimental physics from Imperial College London, UK (2005), a Japan Society for Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellowship (2007), a Ramon y Cajal research fellowship (2009), a permanent position as tenured scientist of CSIC (2012), the Most Outstanding Young Researcher in Experimental Physics Award (from the Spanish Royal Society of Physics and Fundación BBVA) (2012), an individual European Research Council Consolidator grant (2014), promotion to research scientist of CSIC (2017), two ERC PoC grants (2020 and 2022) and CSIC best mentor award in 2024.
Mariano and his team have advanced a disruptive technology for the high throughput screening of solar cell and thermoelectric materials that combines gradients in the parameters of interest with colocal hyperspectral imaging, which results in more than 50 times faster evaluation of materials, saving up to 90% of the raw chemicals.
His research has been internationally recognised through more than 50 invited presentations at international conferences, and the over 12200/14600 citations (Web of Science/Google Scholar, h-index of 51/55) that his 161 papers have already received. He is also co-inventor in eight patents, and has recently co-founded the spin-off company Molecular Gate S.L.. From 2019 to 2022 he was the Coordinator of the Materials for Energy and Environment Subarea of the Agencia Estatal de Investigación. He is in the top 2% of scientific researchers worldwide according to the Stanford ranking. He was promoted to Research Professor in April 2022.
