Venture Forum 2009 Report

FIRST EVER OPERA VENTURE FORUM HELD ON MAY 19 2009

Focused investor-entrepreneur match-making can make the difference

In total 41 people registered for the OPERA Organic Electronics Venture Forum that took place on 19 May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. The attendees represented start-ups and small and medium-sized companies, venture capital companies, consultancies, business incubators and research organisations from nine European countries.

The objective of the venture forum was to facilitate interactions between European investors and new OLAE start-ups and SMEs. While seeking for funding / investment opportunities was perhaps the single most important reason to register for most commercial players, the ability to follow industry trends and to network were also referred to as motivators to attend.

The event was opened by Mr. Ed van den Kieboom, President, Plastic Electronics Foundation, after which followed two keynote speeches. The first was from Dr. David Fyfe, Chief Executive of Cambridge Display Technology Ltd. He talked about opportunities for innovation in the OLAE value chains and presented the key milestones of the CDT case. The second was from Dr. Johannes Canisius, R&D Director for Merck Chemicals Ltd. He outlined the challenges of and prerequisites for creating new businesses from emerging technologies, using the evolution of liquid crystals as an example.

Both keynote speakers stressed the importance of maintaining determination and building mutually beneficial partnerships with key customers, technology providers and investors. It may take a considerable amount of time before a technology can prove its creditworthiness. In the meantime, the first and second round investors may lose their faith in the enterprise.

The lesson is this: While it is generally perceived that the OLAE market is gradually taking off, the 'valley of death' may be wide and money, at least seed stage funding, will be tight for some years to come. Many investors share this view, too. However, many of these investors who are not yet investing in OLAE are nevertheless actively following the development of the industry.

After the keynote speeches the presenting companies had the chance for their sales pitches. Each company had a 15-minutes to present to the room. There were twelve presentations in all, followed by question and answer sessions.

The presenting companies represented different application areas within OLAE, including displays, lighting, solar cells, sensors, batteries, gaming and so forth, as well as various positions in the value chain - from materials and processing technologies to systems integration. Many of the companies were still relatively small, and their short-term funding needs varied between 400 k€ and 20 M€. Investments in production capacity, market development and expansion in general require a lot of money in particular, usually much more than the development of technologies and demonstrators.

The remainder of the day was reserved for one-to-one meetings. There were three meeting rooms reserved for that purpose and the remained busy for the rest of the day. We hope to be able to report further activity in the near future regarding the outcome. This was generally what the OPERA Venture Forum was essentially about!

In general, feedback has been very positive. As a result, the organisers are already looking forward to organising the next OPERA Venture Forum sometimes in the near to mid-term future.

The event was organised by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Plastic Electronics Foundation (the Netherlands) as part of a EU-funded research project OPERA.

OPERA Venture Forum website
http://opera-project.eu/index.php?id=13&lang=EN

International Summit on OPV Stability, ISOS-2 ‘09 Report

Contact person: Albert van Breemen, Holst Centre/TNO, albert.vanbreemen@tno.nl

The first International Summit on OPV Stability (ISOS-1) was held in 2008 in Denver, USA. It nucleated an international effort to look at lifetime, round robin testing and development of a concurrence roadmap for OPV. The second International Summit on OPV Stability on April 21-22, 2009 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands was organized in a collaborative effort between the European Coordination and Support Action Projects OPERA and OrgaPVnet, together with Plextronics, Konarka, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Department of Energy (DOE). This event was an interactive and discussion-filled meeting, attended by 65 persons from 11 countries and 34 organizations. It brought together a select group of global leaders in the area of OPV development and commercialization to initiate the creation of global standards for measuring OPV stability, performance and lifetime. Talks were contributed from several companies and institutes addressing the current state-of-the-art in different sectors of the community:

• “Correlation and Acceleration - How does laboratory accelerated testing correlate to real-life ageing?” by Dr. Andreas Riedl, Atlas MTS.
• Stability and degradation of R2R processed flexible polymer solar cells by Dr. Frederik Krebs, Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy.
• Recent OPV lifetime efforts and results and status of current DoE roadmap by Dr. David Ginley, National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
• Standardization of OPV lifetime and technology update by Dr. Darin Laird, Plextronics.
• State of the art in ALT and outdoor testing of OPV by Dr. Jens Hauch, Konarka.

While it was of course premature to establish a detailed, comprehensive set of measurement practices, there are number of concrete suggestions that resulted from the breakout sessions:

• technology specific qualification testing

simple                                   advanced
shelf-life                                  damp-heat
high temperature storage          light-soak
illumination test                        outdoor

• Round robin lab-to-lab efficiency correlation

A round robin will be initiated in the 3rd quarter of 2009 to determine lab-to-lab efficiency correlations. 15 Participants have already volunteered. At first, a commercial package based on monocrystalline Si will be used. ECN and NREL provide a measurement protocol and report form. All data will be collected by NREL and disseminated to the community. In a second round, a similar protocol will be used to determine lab-to-lab efficiency correlations for OPV-based devices.

All presentations, together with the results of the break-out sessions will be published on the ISOS-2 ‘09 wikispaces website in the 3rd quarter of 2009.
Preparations for ISOS-3 ’10 have already started. It will be organized by Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, together with all the members of the ISOS-2 organizing committee. Tentative date and venue: week 16 (19-25 april 2010) in Roskilde, Denmark

Above: ISOS-2 organizers: from left to right Jens Hauch (Konarka), Albert van Breemen (Holst Centre, representative of OPERA), Darin Laird (Plextronics), David Ginley (NREL), Jan Kroon (ECN, representative of OrgaPVnet)