daniel buenoPhysicist Vladimir Airoldi, 59, has been splitting his time between working as a senior researcher at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and managing his business, Clorovale, also located in the city of São José dos Campos, São Paulo State, for almost 17 years. He adapted the synthetic diamond technology used in the aerospace industry to the manufacture of dental drills and other equipment, such as drill bits for oil wells. Today his company exports to South America and Europe, and sales reached $4 million in 2013. Airoldi founded the company in 1997 when his proposal was approved under the FAPESP Program to Support Research in Small Business (Pipe).
“INPE has a work policy that is unique under Brazilian labor law, which states that we must work 40 hours a week, full-time, but we may also work somewhere else in our free time,” he explains. “There were days, when the company was getting off the ground, that I worked 20 hours.” Airoldi says that he arrives at the company at 7 am and is already at INPE by 8 am most days. He visits Clorovale again at lunchtime and in the evening after work at the Institute, when he devotes more time to the company. Today he has executive directors looking after sales and technology at Clorovale. Many of them are his former doctoral students. “The biggest challenge is to manage innovation, especially in the beginning,” he says. To improve management, he earned an MBA. “I also went to other countries to study their innovation cultures,” he says. Airoldi could have taken advantage of the Innovation Law to take some time off from INPE to run the company. “But leaving would have meant cutting the umbilical cord tying me to the constant innovation process at INPE,” he explains.
Another physicist, Spero Morato, 70, also founded his company with the knowledge gained from over 30 years of working as a researcher at the Nuclear and Energy Research Institute (IPEN) in São Paulo, where he rose to the highest position, equivalent to the presidency. In the case of Spero, the idea of establishing a company came after retirement, in 1995. “I was asked by the United Nations (UN) to provide technological courses on laser applications. Other professors and I taught the courses in several countries, but they ended in 1998. When I returned, I realized I could start a business and that’s what I did, with a proposal approved through Pipe. “The company, Lasertools, was incubated at the Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology (Cietec), which is in the IPEN building on the University of São Paulo (USP) Butantã campus. He invited another four researchers from the institute who had worked with him on lasers for awhile to join him.
In 2009, Spero returned to IPEN after being awarded the title of researcher emeritus. “We are developing technologies for medical applications and vivariums that can then be transferred to other companies.” Today he has 25 employees at Lasertools and revenues of about R$2.5 million per year from the manufacture of automotive parts, medical and promotional products using lasers. He also established another company, Innovatech, which pioneered the production of stents in Brazil. These small metal cylinders are placed in the arteries of the heart that have become obstructed by fatty plaque or calcium in order to restore blood flow. Last year, he transferred the manufacturing technology to another company, Scitech, in the state of Goiás. For new entrepreneurial researchers, he recommends working with the end product in mind. “It is a personal characteristic to be an entrepreneur, but Brazil does not need just the latest technology; a lot of innovation can be done with imported technology, which we do not have here.”
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