Research in fibre-based spectroscopy and sensing yields big, currently widely untapped innovation potential. With its excellent infrastructure and human resources innoFSPEC aims at translating and exploiting its research results towards innovation development.

Together with regional, national and international partners from science and industry we do joint projects spanning the whole range of fundamental to applied research. In particular, our application labs offer excellent conditions for a close and fruitful collaboration between academia and high-tech industry. Besides specific scientific and industrial communities, transfer activities of innoFSPEC reach out to politics and the general public.

The transfer lab is a scientific laboratory for initiating cooperation and for testing, adapting and further developing a scientific methodology with the aim of permanently applying this technology in industry or other research institutions. To this end, suitable industrial cooperation partners are approached. Once such a contact has been established, the transfer laboratory carries out the first orienting preliminary investigations, which give an indication of whether it might actually make sense to use the technology with the partner in question. In the case of success, the company and the UP will work out a more extensive and deeper cooperation.

The transfer lab is in a partnership relationship with the innoFSPEC research lab, which brings together those research activities of its group that have a higher degree of application maturity. innoFSPEC can be understood as an innovation centre, which is upstream of the transfer through the transfer lab. The transfer lab and the innoFSPEC research lab share their scientific infrastructure. In the laboratory, scientists working on research topics are located next to those working on transfer projects. innoFSPEC is located at two sites in Golm: Building 60 (Mühlenberg 3) and Builiding 29. As a „twin laboratory“ it, thus, merges two functions under one roof: A scientific lab with fundamental and applied research activities in the areas of astrophotonics, multimodal spectroscopy and innovative materials and sensing; and a transfer lab which actively brings the results from the scientific lab and other research groups from the Faculty of Science into application.

Prof. Dr. Hans-Hennig von Grünberg

Transfer director

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Under the motto "from molecules to galaxies", innoFSPEC Potsdam was founded in 2008 as a joint project of the University of Potsdam (UP) and the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) to establish interdisciplinary research between astrophysics and physical chemistry with international appeal at the Potsdam location.

The idea of an unusual combination of two disciplines is based on the idea that the joint use of the same "photonics" methodology with different scientific questions has the potential to produce innovations that would not arise from more one-dimensional research topics.

A prominent example of the success of this approach is innoFSPEC's world-leading position in the use of integral field spectroscopy from astrophysics for imaging Raman spectroscopy of organic and inorganic samples, which is attracting international interest especially for new devices in cancer diagnostics. In addition, photon density wave (PDW) spectroscopy was successfully further developed at innoFSPEC as an innovative method for optical process analysis technology (OPAT) and the company PDW Analytics was founded in 2013.