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This chapter shows the continued and growing interest and value to industry of the ESRF as an X-ray source, but also as a technology developer and driver.

The articles highlight some of the exploitation of the X-ray beamlines, from improving catalyst performance (page 164), and structural biology to support the fight against COVID-19 (page 165), to understanding crystal defects for optimised power applications (page 166), investigating a kinase protein implicated in Parkinson s disease (page 167) and helping better battery design by understanding structural defects (page 168). The chapter also includes a look at the TamaTA tailored access for small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs) as supported by the European Commission as a pilot project in the CALIPSOplus Horizon2020 project (page 169).

A year of continued change

Even while the COVID-19 pandemic continued to change our lives, the ESRF was open and operational for most of 2021. Enabling this were the ESRF staff, who worked to allow clients to continue to benefit from the ESRF s X-ray beamlines and expertise for commercial research and development needs. A huge thank you goes to everyone supporting industrial researchers at the ESRF during these difficult times.

Although the first half of the year was particularly challenging due to the pandemic, the second half saw a strong up-tick in commercial activity as businesses reopened, and the ESRF reopened to visiting researchers when travel within or to France was permitted. Although remote access and mail-in of samples works well, the ESRF commercial programme is a user programme, albeit for confidential access, and an important element of this is to welcome our clients onsite, having industrial researchers using the beamlines in person and engaging with ESRF beamline scientists. The mixed mode of remote, mail- in and onsite access is undoubtedly here to stay and we will continue to support industry at the usual high levels of support no matter the access route or the partnership framework. There is nothing like adversity to drive forward innovation.

Our impact on industry

With the support of CALIPSOplus, a new Impact on Industry brochure has been produced. The objective is to highlight success stories with industry as ESRF users, suppliers and collaborators. Thirteen companies are featured, including Airbus, AstraZeneca, Novitom, Prior PLM Medical and Takis Biotech. The brochure is available online at: https://zenodo.org/record/5770308.

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