CONTACT: Ron Kirksey, Kent State, 330-672-8535 Kelly Coolbaugh, NorTech, 216-241-8458

KENT, Ohio – Kent State University announced a new era in focused, 21st-century research and economic development today, unveiling a leading-edge research park in the former bus garage on the Kent Campus.

“The Kent State Centennial Research Park is an important part of my vision for the university as it enters its second century, by cultivating and capitalizing on intellectual property,” said Kent State President Lester A. Lefton. “This innovative research initiative fits our mission as a major public research university to promote academic excellence, to provide regional development opportunities and to push the boundaries of discovery for the good of the public.”

The Research Park will provide space and support for specialized companies to thrive and grow near the university and its other partners. Kent State graduate and undergraduate students will have opportunities for research, internships and employment; faculty researchers from the Liquid Crystal Institute and other disciplines will be available for collaborative projects; and the university has entrepreneurial assets available to aid business growth through its centers that specialize in technology transfer, small business development, business innovation and minority-owned businesses.

The anchor tenant of Kent State’s Centennial Research Park will be the FLEXMatters Accelerator, a broad, public-private high-technology collaboration, designed to produce a new generation of advanced materials and promote regional economic development.

The FLEXMatters Accelerator will work with local companies to develop and produce devices that are typically rigid on flexible polymer substrates. This collaboration will lead to production of liquid crystal-based flexible displays, eyewear, electronics and other devices. FLEXMatters Accelerator, the first step for the Centennial Research Park, arose from a partnership between Kent State and NorTech, a technology-based economic development organization for Northeast Ohio that has been a catalyst in building high-tech regional collaboration.

“This region’s strengths in Kent State’s liquid crystals and the University of Akron’s polymer research form a combination found nowhere else in the world,” said Dr. John L. West, vice president for research and dean of graduate studies at Kent State. “Our vision is to turn this education, research and development effort into an industrial cluster that will put Northeast Ohio in the lead of this emerging global technology.”

Kent State ranks fifth in the world and second nationwide among universities in the number of start-up companies formed per $1 million in research expenditures.

The concept of an “accelerator,” rather than an incubator, came about because the facility and the Research Park will bring together researchers from universities and new and established companies to “accelerate” the region’s ability to commercialize discoveries, West said.

The FLEXMatters Accelerator is a model for further expansion within the Centennial Research Park.

“The great thing about FLEXMatters is that it brings together three of our region’s strengths – liquid crystals, polymers and manufacturing – in a way that enables us to compete globally in the emerging flexible display market,” said NorTech President and CEO Dorothy Baunach. “Northeast Ohio should be able to capture a significant and important share of this market by building on our strengths, which include the innovative prowess of people like John West and the research communities of Kent State and the University of Akron, as well as local companies like Kent Displays, AlphaMicron and Hanna Micro.”

The initial phase of this project is funded by a portion of the Ohio Third Frontier Research Commercialization Project for the Flexible Liquid Crystal Film Manufacturing Alliance. Led by Kent Displays, the alliance joins AlphaMicron, Akron Polymer Systems and Sheldahl with Kent State and the University of Akron to develop and produce flexible liquid crystal displays and eyewear.

The alliance is supported by an additional $8 million in matching funds from the collaborators.

Two additional research and commercialization projects have joined the FLEXMatters initiative to help build this emerging cluster and to market the region’s technology assets. The University of Akron-led Commercialization of Functional Polyimide Films and Nanocomposites joins companies from around the state to develop polyimide films for a wide range of products. The Graftech-led Development and Commercialization of Graphite Nanocomposites for the next Generation of Electronic devices will develop the next generation of thermal management films.

All of the collaborators share the goal of developing locally the materials and manufacturing processes for the next generation of electronic optical devices.

Centennial Research Park is located at the corner of State Routes 59 and 261, in the Fiala Building, the former home of Kent State’s student-operated campus bus service, the nation’s largest such operation. Following a partnership with PARTA, the Portage County transportation network, Kent State no longer needed the 44,000 square feet and 10 surrounding acres as a bus garage.

“Now this facility will have a new life serving future economic development in Northeast Ohio, as a globally significant research park connected to a major research university,” Lefton said.

Commercialization of Functional Polyimide Films and Nanocomposites:  Led by the University of Akron this project targets the market applications of polyimides. It is an extension of the Center for Multifunctional Polymer Nanomaterials and Devices (CMPND), a 2005 Wright Center of Innovation. Polyimides (PIs) are high performance polymers with a wide range of properties that can be easily adapted to withstand extreme thermal, electrical, and mechanical environments.

Development and Commercialization of Graphite Nanocomposites for the Next Generation of Electronic Devices: Led by Graftech International this project will develop graphite-based nanocomposites for improved thermal and electrical conductivity. The project will strengthen Ohio's presence in the lightweight, high performance electronic device market and make it more cost effective.

Flexible Liquid Crystal Film Manufacturing Alliance: Led by Kent Displays this project will develop specialized flexible liquid crystal displays and liquid crystal eyewear. The grant will support the development of two roll-to-roll processing lines of liquid crystal film, one for flexible displays such as credit cards, wrist watches, and ID tags, and a separate line for eyewear.

Through Flexmatters the partners will work together to build a new manufacturing infrastructure, supporting local companies and attracting new companies to the region.

FlexMatters Partners include: Kent State University, Kent Displays, AlphaMicron, University of Akron, CMPND, NorTech, the Fund for Our Economic Future, GrafTech International, Sheldahl, Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University, Akron Polymer Systems, and the Functional Polymides Center at University of Akron.

http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/1461811

Kent State University faculty and students will play a central role in the inauguration of Gov. Ted Strickland, designing and accessorizing outfits for Frances Strickland to wear at the inaugural ceremonies.

Faculty from KSU's School of Fashion Design and Merchandising will dress Ohio's first lady in a suit and an inaugural ball gown. A faculty member and students from the School of Art created a hand-woven shawl that coordinates with the gown.

"Mrs. Strickland chose the designs with the state of Ohio in mind and wanted to keep this project in the state to help designers in Ohio," says Linda Ohrn-McDaniel, co-designer of the suit and inaugural gown, and assistant professor in Kent State's Fashion School.

Ohrn-McDaniel and Sherry Schofield-Tomschin, associate fashion professor, were contacted in December to design the suit and the gown.

"Mrs. Strickland decided that she needed a gown and suit for the inauguration ceremonies and knew that getting something special and unique was important," says Schofield-Tomschin. "Her requests were minimal. She wanted a fairly traditional suit and a gown in a purple shade."

The two designers collaborated on the design, creating and submitting sketches and a half-size prototype for Strickland to choose the styles she most liked.

After meeting with Strickland for her initial fitting, the designers tweaked their original concepts and started work on a cobalt blue, wool satin gabardine suit and a gown in a dusty amethyst silk crepe material.

The gown features Swavorski crystals and liquid crystal-based sequins donated by Kent-based, AlphaMicron Inc., a company specializing in liquid crystal applications that has strong ties with the university's Liquid Crystal Institute.

An especially unique "pattern" of embroidery on the gown, not being revealed until the evening of the inaugural ball, places the amount of design work poured into the piece at an estimated 300 hours.

Kent, Ohio (December 15, 2006) – Kent Displays Incorporated (KDI), the LCD manufacturer of Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Display products leads a project team, that has been awarded an $7.9 M Research and Commercialization Project (RCP) grant by the State of Ohio’s Third Frontier Project. Major collaborators in this project include AlphaMicron and Kent State University. The award was announced by Governor Bob Taft during a press conference held earlier today at Cleveland State University.

The RCP Program was designed by the Ohio Department of Development to support technology based economic development through research and commercialization activities in Ohio.

Kent Displays, a spin off from Kent State University, was created to further develop and commercialize Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Display (ChLCD) technology, taking advantage of their low-power requirement and reflective features to create greatly improved displays for portable devices.

The newly awarded state grant will help Kent Displays and its collaborators accelerate the establishment of a manufacturing cluster in Ohio to commercialize flexible liquid crystal display and eyewear products and devices. The project will achieve the following:

• Installation of manufacturing facilities that will be compatible with commercially available plastic substrates and simple production processes, making Northeast Ohio a global leader in the production of such devices.

• Build a business accelerator at Kent State University to attract supply chain providers including display materials, flexible substrates, and manufacturing equipment.

• Establish an industrial cluster in Northeast Ohio to manufacturer flexible displays and eyewear that will produce jobs, and other economic development opportunities for the region and state.

“We are very pleased to receive this Third Frontier grant. This project is a true collaborative effort and could not have been achieved without the support of our academic and industry collaborators. We look forward to taking our work to the next level and advancing Northeast Ohio as the center for commercialization of flexible liquid crystal products, thus having a major impact on the global display industry,” said Joel Domino, President of Kent Displays.

Collaborators that have provided support and leadership for this RCP include: AlphaMicron, Akron Polymer Systems, Sheldahl, Kent State University, the University of Akron, Ohio Polymer Strategy Council, Team NEO, NorTech and the Fund for Our Economic Future.

“Ohio’s strong industrial base in plastics and printing, and leading research strengths in liquid crystals, polymers and polymer engineering make our region a natural home for this emerging industry,” said Dr. Bahman Taheri, CEO of AlphaMicron.

Momentum on this initiative has been building in the region for the past few months with the establishment of FlexMatters, an initiative focused on building an industrial cluster in Northeast Ohio for the research, development and production of flexible displays, electronics and photo-voltaics. As part of this project, FlexMatters has already begun to attract companies to the region including, Sheldahl, a Minneapolis-based supplier of flexible substrates for liquid crystal products that’s a partner in the RCP initiative. Sheldahl is currently in the process of moving some of its activities to Kent and in order to join this growing flexible display cluster.

For more information, please contact: Joel Domino, President, Kent Displays at 330-673-8784 or jdomino@kentdisplays.com

About Kent Displays: Headquartered in Kent, Ohio, Kent Displays, Inc. is the world leader in “No Power” Cholesteric liquid crystal display technology. Kent Displays’ ChLCD technology is ideal for use in portable products, and applications in which low power consumption and high contrast viewing are important design criteria. Kent has partnered with Kent State University’s Liquid Crystal Institute to advance the capabilities of ChLCD technology. Many signage applications use ChLCD technology because of its unsurpassed sunlight viewability combined with the lowest power consuming electronic display. Kent Displays is spin-off from Kent State University and utilizes technology developed at the Liquid Crystal Institute. Please visit www.kentdisplays.com or www.nopowerdisplays.com  

About AlphaMicron: AlphaMicron, Inc. was formed in response to an SBIR solicitation by the US Air Force for the development of variable transmittance visors for use by pilots in conjunction with helmet mounted displays. Since its inception, AlphaMicron has developed and demonstrated the only liquid crystal product on doubly curved (spheroidal) plastic substrates. AlphaMicron’s Variable Attenuation Liquid Crystal Device (VALiD) gives the user instantaneous control over the tint and/or color of eyewear; either automatically, or at the touch of a finger. The combination of VALiD and plastic substrates has resulted in the first viable liquid crystal device for sun-sport applications. AlphaMicron is actively interested in commercializing its technology for other consumer and military eyewear. www.alphamicron.com  

About FlexMatters: The FlexMatters initiative was established to grow and support a new industry in Ohio for the research, development and manufacture of flexible optical and electronic devices. FlexMatters was funded by a grant from the Fund for Our Economic Future (www.futurefundneo.org), a collaboration among 80 philanthropic organizations from across Northeast Ohio to encourage and advance an agenda for regional economic transformation. The Fund’s grant is providing critical early support to catalyze this initiative and to attract partners and the additional funding required for further development. For more information about FlexMatters, please visit www.flexmatters.org  

Alternatively, the LCD industry, which began over thirty years ago with wristwatch and calculator displays, only really took off with the advent of the lap-top computer.  This entirely new application fed the LCD industry. The lap-top computer display was the killer application that allowed the LCD industry to grow and thrive.  For years consumers tolerated poor performance and relatively high prices because it was the only game in town.  The industry rapidly grew.  The quality of displays greatly improved and the prices fell.

By the late 90's the industry was ready to take on the deeply entrenched CRT industry.  The first target was the desktop monitor, where small size and stable images were premiums consumers would pay for.  It is only in the last couple of years that LC TV's have taken on the CRT head to head and consumers are finally replacing those behemoths in their living rooms.     Plasma TVs followed a bit of a different track, finding their initial killer application in large, direct view flat screens.

So how will flexible displays enter the market?  Will they challenge directly established glass based displays or create their own markets? The jury is clearly still out on this one.  The consumer has yet to speak.  Everyone in the industry knows flexible is coming and many bets have been placed on a variety of technologies.  The vision of the killer application depends not only on the technology selected but also the return required to justify the investments made to develop a technology and bring it to market.  If a technology has eaten up hundreds of millions or even billions in development the killer application is necessarily pushed to the high-end displays that compete in quality and performance with the current glass displays.  They demand a quick "CD" type of replacement of an embedded technology. 

However, if the investments have been more modest the first killer application may also be much more modest, such as monochrome displays for watches or credit cards.  The return on investment can be justified and the manufacturing infrastructure built from initial modest beginnings.  As the production processes improve and the quality of the displays grow the applications will become more sophisticated and eventually we will make that display that rolls out from a cell phone or pen.  

The companies in FLEXMatters have followed a very lean financial approach.  They are moving to market with relatively modest investments and can therefore succeed by serving initially relatively small markets.  As they build the manufacturing infrastructure they can continue to improve the performance of their flexible displays, expand the markets and grow the industry.  As I said above, the jury is still out on what the killer application will be for flexible displays.   I think it will be relatively simple and serve a very specific niche.  The trick is to make our investment match the potential return.  In this game to large of a bet may shut you out of the competition.  The next few years will be interesting.

IDW '06 will integrate thirteen workshops and one topical session in specialized fields playing important roles in information display activities. Each workshop will be composed of invited and contributed papers for oral and poster presentations. Suggestive and detailed discussions on each specialized R&D update will be provided.

The three-day conference will feature 465 papers, including 1 keynote address, 2 invited addresses, 76 invited papers, 170 oral and 216 poster presentations, and some additional late-news papers will also be arranged. Following keynote and invited addresses on Wednesday morning, presentations will begin and continue in six parallel sessions through Friday. Poster sessions and author interviews will enable participants to discuss presented issues in detail. Exhibitions from display and related industries will also be featured from Wednesday to Friday in parallel with workshops and topical session. The IDW '06 should be of interest not only to researchers and engineers, but also to those who manage companies and institutions in the display community.

	Sponsored by
	The Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers The Society for Information Display

For more information, visit: http://idw.ee.uec.ac.jp/ 

With more than 550 booths and 8,000 attendees, SID is the leading North American show for the electronic-display industry.

For more info visit: www.sid2007.org

            The conference provided a great opportunity to "roll out" FLEXMatters.  It also provided me an opportunity to talk with researchers from around the world working in the field and to present to them our vision.  As the keynote address made clear, flexible does indeed matter. 

            The FLEXMatters vision was strongly supported by the presentations of Kent Displays.  They showed how they are entering the market now with innovative products.  Check out the video of Kent Displays flag, which is a cholesteric display printed on a woven fabric substrate to see just how far they have come.  They also demonstrated how they can ink jet print conducting polymer electrodes on polyester substrates to make full color displays. 

            Among the people I had an opportunity to talk with was Greg Crawford.  Greg graduated from KSU in the late 80's and has done extremely well.  He is now Dean of Engineering at Brown University and author of Flexible Flat Panel Displays.  He was enthusiastic about FLEXMatters and our vision.  He agreed that our innovative approach provides us with an early entry to the market and an opportunity to grow this industrial cluster in Northeast Ohio.  I have asked him to be a guest columnist so stay tuned for a perspective from outside of Kent on FLEXMatters.

FLEXMatters will build a new industrial cluster in Northeast Ohio based on manufacturing emerging products on flexible plastic substrates, including displays, complex electronics and solar cells. The goal of FLEXMatters is to create new industries, companies and jobs in the state of Ohio by leveraging existing technology strengths and assets. Northeast Ohio is poised to establish the early lead in this global race by assuring that the enabling technologies and manufacturers establish in this region.

According to West "The opportunity is based on this region's lead in liquid crystal display research and development complemented by Northeast Ohio's core industrial strengths in polymers and printing. Industrial research centers around the world, including here in Kent, are pursuing the development of these flexible devices; however the manufacturing base has yet to develop.  We're aiming to develop that base here."

The silicon revolution of the 1980s was fostered by the development of the integrated circuits and thin film transistors that are the basis for all consumer electronics, ranging from the cell phones to large flat screen TVs.  The displays and electronics in these devices are currently all produced using batch processing on rigid substrates.  According to FLEXMatters, the future lies in producing these devices on flexible substrates using much more efficient roll-to-roll production techniques.  Northeast Ohio's strong industrial base in plastics and printing, and leading research strengths in liquid crystals, polymers and engineering make it the logical home for this emerging industry.

A number of partners are joining FLEXMatters to support the development of this new cluster.  These include NorTech, Kent State University, the Ohio Polymer Strategy Council, PolymerOhio, the Center for Multifunctional Polymer Nanomaterials and Devices (CMPND), the University of Akron and Team NEO.

Several local start-up companies are taking the lead in manufacturing flexible electronic devices. AlphaMicron was the first in the world to market a flexible liquid crystal lens. Their switchable lenses were incorporated in UVex Ski Goggles and won the Popular Science "Best of What's New" in 2004 award, http://www.alphamicron.com/. Applied Polymer Systems in Akron is providing specialized polymers that are made into flexible films that are applied to the latest flat screen LCD TVs, greatly enhancing their appearance. Kent Displays is currently providing production prototypes of flexible displays using a continuous roll-to-roll process with commercial introduction next year, http://www.kentdisplays.com/.

While flexible liquid crystal displays and related devices will be the first to reach the market, the core manufacturing techniques developed will be the basis of other new industries.  Northeast Ohio is already attracting the attention of companies with complementary skills outside the region to move here in order to be near the emergence of this new industry.

Unlike semiconductors, this region is the natural home for this emerging industry.  "The competition will be fierce, and if we are to capitalize on our early lead we must aggressively seize the opportunity," said Thomas Waltermire, CEO of Team NEO. "To succeed we must market our strengths, effectively address our weaknesses and collaborate across institutions, industries and the region."

"Our vision is that Northeast Ohio will lead the world in flexible device manufacturing and that FLEXMatters will foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit," said Dorothy Baunach, President and CEO of NorTech. "Such a culture will foster the creation of new companies, new technology development in existing companies and more spin-offs from both over time, all resulting in new and good-paying jobs for the region."

The FLEXMatters initiative is funded by a grant from the Fund for Our Economic Future (http://www.futurefundneo.org/), a collaboration among 80 philanthropic organizations from across Northeast Ohio to encourage and advance an agenda for regional economic transformation. The Fund's grant is providing critical early support to catalyze this initiative and to attract partners and the additional funding required for further development.

For more information about FLEXMatters, please visit http://www.flexmatters.org/