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In 2002, Gunter Festel founded the advisory and investment firm FESTEL CAPITAL, which specialises in the commercialisation of technologies in the areas of energy, environment, health, materials and nutrition.
Prior to that, he was a member of the management team and head of the consulting business for the chemical and healthcare industry with Arthur D. Little in Zurich and Wiesbaden as well as co-head of the global chemicals and healthcare business. He was also a consultant with McKinsey & Company in Brussels, Frankfurt and London and held various management positions with Bayer as head of a R&D laboratory, assistant to a member of Bayer's board of directors and product manager
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Gunter Festel holds various degrees in natural and social sciences: a MA and PhD in chemistry with focus on polymer chemistry and physics, a BA in business administration and a MA in economics from the German University of Bayreuth as well as a PhD in management & economics with focus on technology and innovation management from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. Furthermore, he has an Executive Master of Corporate Finance and Master of Advanced Studies in Corporate Finance from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland.
At the ETH Zurich he headed the Start-up Research Group within the Chair of Technology & Innovation Management from 2009 until 2015. Currently he is research fellow at the University of Basel within the Henri B. Meier Chair of Financial Management as well as at the Technical University (TU) Berlin within the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management. At the University of St. Gallen, he gives entrepreneurship lectures within the Institute of Technology Management and change/process management lectures within the Institute of Information Management. He also gives entrepreneurship lectures at various other universities in Europe, like the TU Berlin and the University Dusseldorf as well as at various universities in Asia, like the Kazan State Technical University, the University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore.
Gunter Festel is co-founder and member of the advisory board of the Association for Chemistry and Economics as well as co-founder and member of the executive council of the China Association for Management of Technology. In Switzerland he is a member of the advisory board of the Institute of Chemistry and Biological Chemistry at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. He is a member of the Society for Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (DECHEMA) in Germany and was from 2013 to 2016 board member of the biotechnology section of DECHEMA as well as chairman of the board of the Association of German Biotechnology Companies. He was also a member of the Swiss Chemical Society within the Medical Chemistry Division, the German Society for Petroleum and Coal Science and Technology and the Licensing Executives Society.
Previously he has been engaged as a consultant to the OECD to help create a strategy for the bio-based economy. Within this area he is accepted as an international expert with regular discussions and presentations at different committees within the European Commission. He has been invited as a well-known expert for business aspects of the bio-based economy to give presentations at numerous conferences in Europe, the Americas and especially Asia.
Gunter Festel is reviewer for different governmental institutions like the Swiss National Science Foundation, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, the Czech Science Foundation and the Chilean National Science and Technology Commission. For the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy he sits on the reviewer board of the pre-seed and seed financing programmes for high-tech start-ups and for the German Federal Government of North Rhine-Westphalia in the reviewer board to evaluate spin-offs from universities and research organisations. Previously he was an expert within the Deutscher Gründerpreis and reviewer of various business plan competitions (e.g. Science4Life).
He is author and editor of numerous books and author of more than 300 practice oriented publications on various topics, such as industry trends in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, corporate finance, innovation management, biotechnology and nanotechnology. Besides this, he also publishes regularly in high ranked peer-reviewed scientific journals in natural and social sciences. For numerous scientific journals he acts as scientific reviewer.
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