INTERVIEW customer training, and joint experiments with users. In recent years, we also entered material science, applying our tools to solar cells, LEDs, micro-displays, and other advanced materials.
How did you manage to combine such different areas of expertises ranging from electronics to life science within your team? From the very beginning, we recruited people with both technical expertise and scientific experience. Many of them had just finished their PhD and wanted to bring their knowledge from academia into industry. Over the years, we built a very multidisciplinary team: physicists, electrical & mechanical engineers, chemists, biologists, and software developers. It’ s true that electronics and optics require very different skills, but our culture has always been based on collaboration and listening to customers. That helped us create a coherent company spirit and deliver complete solutions rather than isolated components.
How balanced are your activities between lasers, electronics, and systems? Since the early 2000s, we have maintained a good balance between the three. I often compare it to a table with three legs: it may not be perfectly flat, but it is stable. Some years lasers perform better, some years systems, some years electronics. This diversification has been the key to our stability. Geographically, our sales are also balanced: roughly one-third in Europe, one-third in the US, and one-third in Asia. That gives us resilience against changes in funding or politics in any one region.
One specific feature of your company is its annual scientific workshop. Why is this so important? The workshops are part of PicoQuant’ s DNA. Already in 1995, before the company existed, we organized the first meeting on single molecules with about 50 participants. Here I want to give big kudos to my long-term friend Prof. Joerg Enderlein, now a professor in Göttingen who had very early the strong vision about the importance of single molecule research in the future. He continuously motivated us and we continued with the workshops because the feedback was so positive. Today, our annual Single Molecule Workshop is the leading international event in this field and we just celebrated our 30th anniversary with 250 participants last month. It is not a commercial conference but a genuine scientific meeting. For us, it’ s a way to stay connected to the community, to get inspiration, and to give something back to our users. It is also a place where many of our collaborations and product ideas were born.
Who are your main customers: academia or industry? About 85 % of our applications are academic. We sell to many universities and research institutes worldwide. Some large companies, like Nikon or Zeiss, buy our modules to upgrade their microscopes, but in the end the users
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