Commentary from the front lines here:

Our research group prided ourselves on cutting edge nanotechnology that was also commercially viable.

Just focusing on my project alone, and not the other great ones, if I explained it in the most concise, layperson fashion it was as follows:

You like sugar cookies? Well, guess what, you mix chocolate chips in and BAM 10x better! All you have to do is mix them in when you're mixing the batter the way you already do, no added steps or infrastructure.

My research project was discovering and demonstrating that LED efficiency can be increased by mixing polymer-grafted zirconia nanoparticles in with the LED encapsulant and the encapsulant and phosphor for phosphor concerted white LEDs (just look at the back of your phone, that flash, of yellow, is likely a YAG:Ce phosphor on a blue or royal blue LED, the mixing of the yellow and blue gives you that white).

Despite being humble about mentioning our success, this result is actually pretty important. The US Department of Energy's Solid State Lighting goals include getting even small increases in efficiency through better light extraction (more light out instead of reflecting back in), better thermal conductivity (more heat out than in, heat from the semiconductor and phosphor decrease both of their efficiency), and better lifetime.

We worked with the same companies that manufacture the LEDs, phosphors, and the silicone encapsulant materials so that we were using the same thing companies were using in their manufacturing process for personal and commercial applications. I chose to do a phosphor conformal coating the same way they do in industry (other researchers try crazy versions of phosphor placement to try to get more efficiency but it makes tooling significantly more comprehensive, complex, and you don't get much if any increase in efficiency. You actually get bigger LED structures, so they're more of fun theoretical models of "what you can do").

More briefly: my research set-up was what they do with the materials they use in industry for manufacturing the LEDs we use.

I showed that increase in efficiency by just mixing the nanoparticles into the encapsulant. We did not notice a change in a 1000 hour reliability testing. Other solutions like epoxy encapsulants or Titania nanoparticles have issues like yellowing or other degradation.

Other key things:

It was not insanely expensive to do this, while I never quantified the cost per LED I can assure you it was low (we allocated $10,000 for materials and by the end of the project I was told I needed to burn through the last $6,000 somehow so that funders wouldn't give us less next time. I'm frugal, spending where we need but not frivolously, but our materials weren't super expensive).

The entire production of nanoparticles was scalable (blew my mind, often nanoparticles synthesis and polymer grafting like this can have a drop off in yield as the process scales). Whether you we're making 2.22g yielding 0.7g nanoparticles or 22.2g yielding 7g, (I think that was the conversion, it's been a while) you got the conversion of precursor to nanoparticles to grafted nanoparticles.

All companies have to do is mix it in using the same materials they have been, and we get increased LED efficiency.

Even with it so easy and proven, the road to commercialization is still slow.

One of my peers continued on to a company to help push this technology into application but even such a proven, simple thing is challenging for large industries to pick up.

Unfortunately, our research group was rare in this regard. So many others focus on ivory tower "cool" discoveries, but leave a major gap to commercialization. You can spin your research into a startup company, partner with the corporations that will use it, or try to pitch it, but even a proven enhancement will require luck and a long road.