"Linking different industries will lead to the creation of new value chains."

Hannah Mathews from the Bio4MatPro Competence Center focuses on one of the key levers of industrial innovation: accelerating the transfer of scientific findings into market-ready products. The mission is clear: research must generate impact where it’s needed most – within the value chains of industry.

At the Bio4MatPro Center, technologies are developed with industrial scalability in mind from the outset. Processes, materials, and biotechnological methods are interlinked in such a way that application and production become an integral part of the research process. Industry partners are not just stakeholders, but often co-initiators – serving as essential bridges between the lab and the market.

Hannah Mathews explains in this interview why scientific achievements only become truly relevant once they pass the test of industrial implementation. She highlights the structural hurdles that must be overcome in the transfer process – and why events like the Tech Impact Festival are crucial for bringing research innovations more quickly to where they can generate both economic and societal value.

Photo: Mathews

What are the key challenges in transferring research results from universities to industry?

When we talk about transferring research results from universities to industry, one of the main challenges arises right at the beginning: academia and industry define “success” in very different ways. At universities, the focus is on gaining knowledge, scientific novelty, and publications. In contrast, companies prioritize optimized processes, profit margins, time-to-market, and patent protection. This means that a scientific innovation is initially just an exciting result. It must first be translated into an economically relevant, stable process before it becomes truly interesting for a company.

Additionally, a research result is only relevant to industry if it simultaneously overcomes several hurdles: it has to be cost-competitive, process-robust, legally secured, and scalable to an industrial level. Especially in the natural sciences, we often see that promising technologies work excellently on a lab scale, but never make the leap into large-scale, cost-efficient applications. Achieving this requires not only suitable infrastructures like pilot plants but also a truly interdisciplinary approach. Ideally, technologies are considered from the outset from a production engineering perspective. If we succeed in bringing the disciplines together at an early stage, the chances increase significantly that strong research results will become successful innovations in industry.

How do you address these challenges? What are the keys to a faster transfer?

In our projects, we deliberately focus on a strong product and application orientation. Use cases and target applications were defined together with industry partners. In many of our projects, the industry partners are involved from the very beginning or even take over project leadership to act as translators between technology-driven science and industrial implementation. This ensures that we are not conducting research disconnected from real-world needs, but instead address real problems that also have a market.

Another key is that we directly integrate biotechnology and materials development with production technology, in order to consider process chains and manufacturing methods from the beginning. This allows us to identify early on where technical or economic barriers to later industrialization might lie and to align our research accordingly to overcome them.

At the Bio4MatPro Competence Center, we foster a transfer-oriented mindset and make industry requirements visible early in the research phase. We also show students, doctoral candidates, and postdocs the concrete paths available to them for commercializing their research results. In this, we work closely with our sister project, The Materials Lab Incubator, which supports teams in further developing DeepTech innovations and preparing them for market entry. In this way, we are gradually creating an environment in which excellent research doesn’t remain in the lab but finds its way into the business world more quickly.

The shared goal is the biological transformation of key industries such as textiles, chemicals, medical technology, consumer goods, and lightweight construction. What kind of impact can we expect in these areas in the coming years? What are the key issues?

We believe that linking different industries will lead to the creation of new value chains and specializations that will allow companies to future-proof themselves. The Bio4MatPro Competence Center is developing new technology platforms precisely at these interfaces. We are convinced that companies can significantly strengthen their market position if they rely on biotech-driven high-tech products and biocompatible value chains—that is, on solutions that are technologically advanced but also resource-efficient and more sustainable. This includes both entirely new products and the transformation of existing portfolios toward bio-based materials and processes.

With a view to the structural transformation in the Rhenish mining area, we see a great opportunity to further develop existing supply chains. Through business model expansions centered on biofunctionally integrated materials and a consistent design for circularity, supply chains can become more robust and competitive overall. Our goal is for the production location North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) to benefit sustainably from this development. With our Competence Center, we want to continue contributing to the emergence of new industrial growth cores in the region, and we explicitly invite companies, start-ups, and research teams to take advantage of our innovation network.

The Tech Impact Festival aims to bring the academic and business worlds even closer together. What are your expectations for this festival?

I primarily expect the Tech Impact Festival to offer real dialogue about how we can better close the gap between technological research and practical application. The mission “Bridging the Innovation Gap” fits perfectly with what we do at the Bio4MatPro Competence Center. That’s why I’m especially looking forward to engaging discussions - about both our own approaches and the ideas and experiences of others.

At the same time, the festival is a great opportunity for us to increase the visibility of Bio4MatPro and to connect with people who want to advance the biological transformation in their own industries.

Which topic will you focus on at the event?

I want to use the festival as a platform to explore a central question for the future: How can we actively drive bioeconomy and circular economy forward? I will demonstrate how the biological transformation opens up new opportunities for value creation. I’ll illustrate what this looks like in practice at the Bio4MatPro Competence Center with concrete examples from our projects. And if you're curious about what those are, then your best option is to attend my talk. I look forward to the exchange.