(given by Bernhard Wessling, Jury Speaker**, at the Conference Dinner which more than 500 attended, out of 1,100 conference attendants)

When in 1977 Hideki Shirakawa, Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger published the conductivity increase of Polyacetylene upon reaction with Iodine, within only a few years many hundred University and several dozen industry laboratories (including my company Zipperling Kessler & Co) joined this research. In the 80s, there was a broad scientific exchange between industry and university in our field.

In the late 80s and early 90s, most of the companies left the field, some new ones came in, went out, a few only (including Zipperling) stayed.

It took 20 years, until mid of the 90s, that the first real, although small, commercial application of conductive polymers started, and another 5 years before some applications became significant, still not yet big. Bayer coats Agfa films with PEDOT, and our Ormecon Chemie sells Polyaniline for anti-corrosion, printed circuit board finishing and for various blend applications. DuPont uses quite a bit of Polyaniline.

Conjugated and conductive polymers are joining forces in the emerging PLEDs, which hopefully will make it to the market, where Bayer's PEDOT and Ormecon's PAni will compete in helping CDT's and Covion's emitters to emit light in Philips' and Siemens' LEDs.
Charge-transfer complexes have not yet made it to the market continuously, neither oligomeric organic semiconductors, but there are now exciting new prospects.

In the early stage with still a long scientific and even longer practical way to go, now the exciting nanotubes and fullerenes join our field and promise energy harvesting and storage, or solar cells.

So now, since some years, a new dialogue evolves on science and technology of conjugated and conductive molecules, polymers and materials, between companies and universities.

When 2 years ago in Montpellier, Prof. Serdar Sariciftci and I had discussed our idea of starting an Industrial Award for the ICSM, we had in mind to encourage and appreciate such scientific dialogue and exchange of results:

• what may be the application potentials of new scientific discoveries, which work is needed for approaching it?
• or: what new scientific questions are arising from new technological ideas or requirements?

So we are glad to have gathered some first companies to support this award. We, Ormecon, contributed half of the prize, the other four companies (Bayer, Uniax, ECN and Agrolinz) the other half.

The award will be devoted to the most innovative scientific contribution to our field in the past 2 years since last ICSM, presented at the conference. It is well coveted and endowed, better than many other scientific awards, and my goal is to even increase it.

We hope to attract even more good and outstanding scientific groups to join our ICSM community, present their work on this conference and to compete for the award.

The International Advisory Board has decided to try to establish a continuity and has asked Serdar to act as a chairman again, and to assure that companies will contribute again and hopefully more than this time. Thank you, Serdar, for taking over the job. You may ask me again to contribute next time.

This first time, we are glad to have a really outstanding contribution to assign the award to. It is classical in the sense of the dialogue question I mentioned earlier: new technological challenges have motivated new scientific work and discoveries.

Bertram Batlogg and his collaborators Hendrik Schoen and Christian Kloc from the Bell Labs (Lucent Technologies) have shown us in their Plenary Lecture and in many key papers* in the last months, how to improve mobility in molecular crystals, what properties these new old crystals have, they showed the insulator-to-metal transition in FET arrangements, the first carbon-hydrogen superconductor and the first electrically pumped laser.

**The Jury consisted of