At SPI 2011 in Dallas, we had an opportunity to speak with Howard Berke, Chairman & CEO, Founder of Konarka who updated us on the company's roadmap towards commercialization of its OPV technology.

Howard Berke is currently executive chairman, CEO and co-founder of Konarka Technologies, an innovator in development and commercialization of Power Plastic?, a lightweight, flexible material that converts light to electricity.

Mr. Berke has nearly 35 years of hands-on management experience launching, building and leading both public and private technology companies. This includes 25 years of general management with full P&L responsibility for eight start-up companies and ten years of business development and marketing focusing on emerging technologies.

He has founded or co-founded 13 start-up companies and has initiated and completed numerous corporate acquisitions, mergers and R&D joint ventures in the U.S., Europe and Asia. He advises start-up companies and entrepreneurs in a wide range of fields including medical devices, biotech informatics, software, networking, telecom and energy technology.

In addition to serving as delegate to the World Economic Forum?s Technology Pioneers, he is a former board director for ACORE. He helped to found and organize the New England Clean Energy Council and has guest lectured on entrepreneurship at Yale, Harvard, MIT and elsewhere throughout the world.

Mr. Berke is a board director of SEIA, at The Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), a non-profit organization that advocates for tax and finance policies that support investment in energy efficiency and clean energy. He is a former senior advisor to Good Energies, a global leading private investment firm in solar photovoltaic companies and wind developers.

Mr. Berke received a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Yale University. His academic training includes finance, accounting, operations research, corporate law, architecture and physics.

More about Konarka

Konarka Technologies was founded in 2001 by a team of scientists at UMass Lowell, led by the late Dr. Sukant Tripathy, an internationally known materials scientist and professor at UMASS Lowell, Dr. Alan Heeger, a 2000 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and Howard Berke, Konarka?s Executive Chairman.