The Pioneers

Before there was a company, there were decades of research.

In the late 1970s, Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa discovered how certain polymers could be made to conduct electricity, work that would later earn them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In Linköping, Olle Inganäs began exploring what these materials could actually do. From the 1980s onward, his research helped develop the field of organic electronics and, eventually, organic photovoltaics.

The goal was not indoor solar. Not yet.

The question was much broader: could organic materials become useful electronic materials at all?

Two of Olle’s PhD students would eventually take that research out of the lab and try to build something with it.