Liza Shvyndzikava from Disruptiv that use co-creation to help solve R&D and business challenges interviewed Tomas Zednicek, the Founder and President of the European Passive Components Institute on challenges for university-industry partnership and commercialization of its research activities.
Q: How did you make a decision to found the European Passive Components Institute (EPCI)?
Tomas: I worked for AVX, a leading passive components company, (now KYOCERA AVX) for more than 21 years in various positions from quality failure analysis, through engineering to marketing jobs. But the last 15 years in the company I was working in the position of worldwide technical marketing manager, traveling around the world, visiting customers in different fields of electronics from consumers through automotive, medical, aerospace, etc. and provided feedback to our R&D to develop the right capacitor products. I was traveling a lot, and after 15 years of continuous traveling, I needed a change. I decided to leave the company in 2014.
However, I didn’t want to lose connections with the industry completely. I was thinking what to do and I started collecting news in the industry to stay in touch and try to continue my collaboration with companies and organizations including ESA, European Space Agency. I was collecting the news and linking with some knowledge that I had, and then I told myself why not to share this information with others. So, I started to put everything on the website passive-components.eu, and all of a sudden, I found that this website became the global biggest blog on passive components. That’s how this European Passive Components Institute started and expanded further.
Q: What is the EPCI focused on now?
Tomas: There are now more activities, but everything is related to passive components. In 2017, I started to organize annual conferences on passive components. For many years, I’d been attending international passive components CARTS conferences that had a long tradition from the 70’s but ended in 2014 due to economic issues. These conferences were great in the 90s, where we had real discussions within the complete supply chain. We had attendees from companies like Nokia, Motorola, IBM, and others, because this was the main communication channel. But later on there was less interest from end users to join such conferences as the internet became a primary source of information, and when the event is organized in a hotel, it becomes too expensive for many attendees to participate.
We decided to bring a new style of such conferences hosted by universities, which is also very nice as it provides a better opportunity to connect the industry and the universities in one conference. It is not purely scientific, but also not purely industrial, merging both worlds together. The conference is called PCNS, Passive Components Networking Symposium, and after the first conference in Brno in 2017, we had interest in hosting it from other universities around Europe. Currently, this is a biennial event, changing locations through European universities that host such events. The next conference will happen next year, in 2025 in Spain. The details will be shared in autumn.
Q: What are the main challenges of university-industry partnership?
Tomas: Working with universities, you have to understand their goals and how they operate. Their missions are completely different compared to the industry’s. Once you recognize and accept this, you can work better together because your expectations are closer to being realistic.
The essential thing is that the universities’ research goal is focused on high-quality publications in impactful magazines, and then, based on this outcome, they offer their results to the industry. But there is a big gap between what the industry can accept and the output of the university. For example, the university develops a new material and publishes great features of this material. But when discussing real output, you may find they produced only a few grams of it to demonstrate its validity. When the industry R&D experts ask if the university can supply some material to try, they often find out that the output is just a few grams and they cannot work with such a small quantity.
Then, the industry experts say they need half a kilogram of such a material. And it is a big challenge for universities because scalability is often an issue. The university researchers might use a method, like sonication, which is not possible to use in mass production. As a result, they might have to start development from scratch to offer scalable solutions. And that’s an issue because universities do not have such strong motivation to invest heavily in scale up solutions while the research is already published, and they have received recognition for it. The next “commercialization” phase costs a lot of money and time, and they do not have strong motivation to move forward and start collaboration with the industry.
Q: It seems that a third-party organization is needed to bridge the gap and bring university research to the industry.
Tomas: Yes, I agree with you. This is a key challenge for many universities. The important step is to have a very strong transfer office with leading capable managers. Many times even from, in our case, EU structures, projects are pushed to have some spin-offs, new startups, etc. But in fact, you are pushing good researchers to become also good managers, dealing with administrative tasks, etc. It’s not always the case that a good researcher would also be a good manager, and they may not even be interested in management because their enjoyment is in research, not in running a company.
So, why try to push a good researcher to become a good manager? Here is where the role of the transfer office comes in. The transfer office may not be able to manage everything, but its key mission is to help the researcher find the right, skilled manager in the field of interest and the scope of the research. This manager may be able to transfer the research into the real industry application using their appropriate management, organizational, and financial skills.
Q: But how often do you see a strong technology transfer office in the university?
Tomas: Very seldom. From time to time it happens, but many times you see this as a really weak spot for universities. They come up with nice ideas, but they lack the commercial background experience, market insight, or motivation to move these ideas into something with practical value and outcomes.
Q: What are other challenges that universities face?
Tomas: For universities, their main function MUST focus on the education of the new generation. However, this is linked to the whole education system in the country from grammar school, high school up to the university.
Especially in technical fields, we see a real drop in interest in studying subjects like physics, technical studies, and electro-technology. The younger generation considers these subjects too difficult. In the current social environment, they do not feel appropriate motivation to become engineers, to be valued after completing such studies which is a pity.
It is really a challenge to inspire small children from grammar school onwards with the attractiveness of technical subjects. I am also partially trying to do something. I have a foundation to support children with micro:bit microcomputers, learn coding, create peripherals using 3D printing, etc. This really attracts young students. It’s unbelievable how the sixth or seventh-grade students can enjoy and play with that. In many cases, I would say girls are even more capable than boys at their age. It’s a pity girls often lose interest in studying technology later on.
This is the challenge for the university: to start working with high schools or even grammar schools to bring projects that would be attractive enough for students to come and study at the university. What we see as a successful model is when students are teaching students. University students can attend specific high school classes or work on projects together. In that case, high school students can already work in university labs on some topic under the supervision of university students, PhD students, or even professors. Similarly, high school students can engage with grammar school students.
It’s a challenge for all of us these days in general — to create and maintain interest in technical subjects studies.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
Tomas: The plans for the future are to continue and further enhance what I’m doing. I see challenges related to AI and how things are rapidly changing, so I need to understand how to best utilize these tools and support the passive components industry.
I am going to continue organizing networking events, meeting people in Europe, the US, and globally. And continue maintaining the website. It is truly global, with 30% of attendees from the US, 30% from Europe, and 30% from Asia, so it has a global impact with an equal share.
And when I have an opportunity, I will push interesting technologies like I do currently with a new generation of graphene supercapacitors from CATRIN Palacky University in Olomouc in the Czech Republic under EIC project with higher levels of energy density and power density. This is a nice part of my job now where I see a real outcome. When you do something in a virtual environment, it’s something that you cannot touch. You create something virtual and if you switch off your computer, where is the outcome? But developing a new generation of capacitors with higher energy density, for example, is something real with visible value and physical product that can stay on the market in a longer time frame. So, I want to have a balanced output in what I’m doing.