A lab to grow tech entrepreneurs: what ‘big science’ can offer

A conversation with Michael Krisch, director of research at the Grenoble-based European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF)

Science|Business reporting 

If Europe is to train more young tech entrepreneurs, its big science labs can become important classrooms that expose them to new technologies – and spark their curiosity, says a leading research infrastructure physicist. 

In a podcast interview with Science|Business, Michael Krisch, director of research at the Grenoble-based European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, says research infrastructures like his amass a wide range of emerging technologies – and a deep know-how of their potential uses – that are important to anyone considering a career in tech entrepreneurship. 

“These are giant microscopes to look at materials and living matter down to the molecular atomic level, with applications that range from health materials, earth and planetary science to more emerging research areas such as cultural and national heritage.” For students who spend some time at these labs, he says, this provides “access to a unique world that is new to them. But they’re ready to discover it.” 

Krisch speaks from direct experience at his and other research infrastructures in training more than 900 wanna-be entrepreneurs in the past few years as part of an EU-funded initiative, ATTRACT Academy.  

Hands-on learning 

The Academy brings students from across Europe and many disciplines – design, finance, marketing, physics, biology and more – to ESRF in Grenoble, to the famed CERN high-energy physics lab in Geneva, and to other facilities. There, they work in small multi-disciplinary teams with lab researchers and technicians to imagine new applications for emerging technologies – and learn how to build a potential business around them. For the students, this hands-on experience is unique and powerful. 

“Once you spark the interest of them, you see the eyes starting to sparkle. And you see a genuine interest or curiosity, to really help and understand and move forward,” Krisch says. 

There’s no debate, of course, over the need for more tech entrepreneurs: so fast is technology changing, and so great its social and economic impact, that Europe will require a steady supply of ambitious young innovators to stay competitive. But why bring them to research infrastructures – more often associated with quarks or muons than teaching or student workshops? 

The answer, as Krisch sees it: research infrastructures have the wide range of technologies and skills a young entrepreneur needs – and a lot of experience in working across disciplinary boundaries. Chemists, physicists, biologists and other scientists “sometimes have difficulty to understand each other. They speak slightly different languages. So early on, we were used to adapt our way of communicating to these other scientific disciplines.”   

This skill is already helping European industrialists, who increasingly come to research infrastructures to investigate new materials or medical advances – co-innovating with the labs’ staff, says Krisch. “So we are having now many industrial partners that are keen to improve our services for industry. Then you add the students, with their own design background. I mean, you have an ecosystem which is fantastic, and very, very inspiring.” 

Crypto to pipelines 

The student projects so far have included a new kind of monitoring unit for natural gas and hydrogen distribution networks, and a project to commercialise a new random bit generation system for cryptography and cyber security. Other projects include re-imagining a new medical scanner as a tool for restoring old masters’ paintings in a museum, and developing a campaign to screen Bangladeshi shipyard workers for lung cancer. Along the way, because of their lab visits some of the students have gone on to be hired by industrial partners within the ATTRACT ecosystem, Krisch says. 

The Academy is funded as part of the ATTRACT project, a two-phase, multi-year Horizon 2020 initiative led by CERN, and including ESRF, Esade Business School, Aalto University, the European Space Observatory, European XFEL, Institut Laue-Langevin, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the European Industrial Research Managers’ Association.  

The group aims to scale the Academy up in future – adding new partners, in academia, science and industry, in such hot fields as battery research and neuroscience. It wants to facilitate “a change in the mindset” of Europe’s tech world, Krisch says, so that “even the most hardcore, fundamental researchers will have a component of entrepreneurship in their genes.” 

The ultimate goal, says Krisch: “sustaining an ecosystem of innovation, that is, a little bit, getting Europe off its rusty chair. To become competitive, and stay competitive.” 

Sponsored by ATTRACT, an EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation project, under grant agreement No. 101004462.