Scientists get a taste for technology transfer

A system for preserving library books and a super antenna are just two ideas that have been spun off.

A new breed of Spanish scientist is moving out of the labs and into industry. Booksaver, a system that can restore books by the kilo at half the cost of existing methods, is one example of the new spin-off companies that are springing up. Another is Fractus, a design of antenna for communications systems capable of handling multiple services on different bandwidths but which only takes up half the space of conventional antennas. These are two of six new products established with the aid of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia's Innova programme.

Conservaci"n de Sustratos Celul"sicos's Booksaver system aims to make a profit by safeguarding the cultural heritage of the past 150 years. Paper manufactured from the start of the industrial revolution until the 1960s has a fundamental flaw - it contains deposits of aluminium oxide that make it more acidic as it ages. This means that books from this period are now disintegrating as the paper they were printed on loses its strength.

"Our market is collections of half a million volumes or more that are disintegrating," says Rogelio Areal, director of research and development at CSC and lecturer in chemical engineering at the PUC.

He calculates that there are 1.4 billion kilos of books in libraries and archives in Spain, of which 30 per cent are in a bad condition. Unlike other solutions, Booksaver, a kind of "washing machine for books", is portable and allows restoration to take place in situ. This saves on transport and insurance costs.

CSC is part-owned by Dutch multinational Solvay. Originally a supplier of chemical products to the project, Solvay decided to participate more directly. Javier Aranguren, CSC managing director, believes working with the inventors of the product gives his company a competitive edge. "Many companies are not aware of the value of this creative potential. They try to take the technology but do without the inventors," he says.

When his team won the European Information Society Technologies Grand Prize in 1998, Carles Puente, a lecturer in telecommunications at the PUC, decided the time was right to set up a company to market his invention. In September 1999, Fractus was born.

Fractal technology is a system that takes shapes that occur naturally and applies them to the design of telecommunications antennas and microwave circuitry. "Not only is the antenna capable of being shared between several telecoms services at once, operating on different bandwidths simultaneously, but it is also significantly smaller than conventional antennas and therefore easily integrated in mobile phones, personal organisers and the next generation of mobile appliances," Puente says.

Fractus aims to manufacture antenna and microwave circuits with the aid of its industrial partner, Sistemas Radiantes F. Moyano, and sell them directly to telecommunications operators and equipment makers. Spanish mobile operators are already trialling Fractus antennas.

The company is also talking to several other major European companies. Ruben Benet, managing director of Fractus, believes mobile applications are currently the most promising market and expects Fractus to achieve sales of around E10 billion (Pounds 38 million) for these products within four to five years.

Institutions such as the PUC, the polytechnic universities of Madrid and Valencia and Barcelona University are encouraging spin-off companies in a bid to aid the process of technology transfer.

Nevertheless, this trend is still in its infancy, and the recent Bricall report on the future of Spanish higher education described the lack of links between universities and industry as one of the main weaknesses of Spain's higher education system.

While businessmen often complain that universities are bureaucratic and slow to respond to business needs, academics point out that Spanish industry spends less on research and development than other European industrial sectors.

Benet believes government policy is not designed to encourage new technological ventures as existing aids to private-sector R&D spending, such as tax breaks and grants, are available only to established companies with a proven track record. Nevertheless, he is hopeful this will change in the near future.