Cutting solar manufacturing costs

Manufacturing solar cells traditionally involves complex and costly vacuum-based processes. Now, some industry specialists believe new approaches can cut costs and bring ‘grid parity’ within reach. They urge producers to discover how thermal processes and electro-deposition enable cost-effective high volume thin-film PV production. Sunlight may be free, but generating electricity with PV cells remains expensive.…

Getting a word in on presentations

More thoughts on presentations? Well, it’s true, if you google “presentations” you get over 57 million results! Lots of them mention probably things like ‘don’t just read the slides’, ‘keep the word count on each slide to a minimum’, ‘use a sufficiently large font’ – we haven’t counted them all. But it is tricky to…

A passion for crime

Sherlock Holmes, Chief Inspector Barnaby, Dalziel and Pascoe, Miss Marple. We all love reading and watching detectives. But why exactly is that, what makes a detective successful? To find this out, I recently attended a crime fiction writing workshop in Oxford, England. With great enthusiasm, I dived into the world of suspense, betrayal and murder,…

Milk? Full-fat, semi-skimmed or transparent?

Fancy a glass of transparent milk? It could one day be a regular sight on menus and in supermarkets – thanks to a device known as a microsieve and a production technology called 3D lithography. As the name suggests, microsieves are filtration devices that work at the microscopic scale. Now a team from the Delft…

Communicating in the downturn

Communicate with your customers! In a crisis, your customers need reassurance that you are doing everything you can to support them and deliver value. In fact, this may be an ideal moment to improve aspects of your business like customer service and let your customers know! Communicate with your employees! Even if you can’t give…

Crops and climate change

A good story is a simple story: for instance: “EU bans harmful pesticides”. As a headline, it’s clear, direct, and for a lifelong environmentalist like me, it sounds like a good thing. The trouble is, there is another side to the story, one with serious consequences for climate change. This shows that telling a simple…