Catalyst Selection and Optimization Laboratory (CSOL) is the ICIQ’s innovation unit, working in Knowledge and Technology Transfer (KTT) from the ICIQ to industry.

This transition phase, which counts with great professionals with several years’ worth of experience, is divided in two main areas:

•  Innovation and technology valorisation of ICIQ’s projects: optimizing, scaling and improving the technologies and processes discovered at the centre, such as catalysts and reagents, reactions, equipment design, and prototype construction. In technology-based products, this may be achieved by faster, cheaper, and more efficient procedures. The valorisation effort increases the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of the technology, which is a way to quantify how far the technology is of being marketed. Once these technologies have been sufficiently matured, they can be transferred to pharmaceutical, chemical, fragancies, energy, materials and plastics industries, thus enabling future commercial exploitation.
• Development of projects with industrial partners: conducting projects with companies. In these cases, the projects are fully funded by the company, which signs a Contract Research Project in order to contract directly the services of KTT to work in a specific topic of their interest. Sometimes the company signs a Contract Research Project with one of ICIQ’s Group Leaders, due to their particular area of expertise, and the project is carried out in the CSOL’s laboratory in order to take advantage of CSOL’s expertise, dedicated equipment and the centre chemical facilities to respond to specific industrial needs.