Soprema, which specialises in airtightness and insulation, takes the development of new materials from biomass very seriously. After examining its needs, the group hit upon a means of eliciting new ideas: the call for proposals. Soprema put Strasbourg’s academic community to the test with the launch of a trans-disciplinary challenge across the different campuses .
A capital endowment worth. €2.3m made it possible, thanks to the interest generated, to provide sustainable funding for research projects of interest to Soprema. A challenge was regularly launched to all of Strasbourg’s laboratories to develop research projects on topics linked to bio-sourced, biodegradable or waste-derived materials.
As the first laureate of this call for proposals in 2014, Nicolas Giuseppone’s laboratory quickly developed self-healing and recyclable polymer materials that found a promising industrial application.
Subsequently, the development of these materials on an industrial scale was supported by public funding from the ANR national research agency worth €433,000 in 2017, a nice use of the leverage effect, in which the costs and risks of the project were shared.
Since then, Nicolas Giuseppone has naturally partnered with Soprema for the exploitation of the patent resulting from this technology.