Instead of giving up, Craig Peters and Brian Hardin found a nanoscience program at the Berkeley Laboratory intended to support ideas like theirs. They formed a small company, Plant PV, and worked with the laboratory’s scientists to improve the technology.

Only then were they able to obtain funding from a private investor who was not concerned about getting an immediate return. “Maybe it’s not a billion-dollar market, but I think they can see their way to a $500-million-revenue market,” Dr. Gur said of the investors.

At the time, Dr. Gur was working at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E research agency as a program manager looking for new ways to commercialize clean energy technologies.

It occurred to him that if he could extend the experience of the two Stanford-educated engineers using the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s resources, it might be possible to create a new kind of public-private model for commercialization.

Now Dr. Gur and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley hope to duplicate that initial success. They have created a technology incubator program intended to support entrepreneurs from academic laboratories until their ideas are mature enough to earn financial backing from chemical or oil and gas companies, or possibly even private investors.

Dr. Gur has persuaded the lab to place a bet on his approach by investing some of its revenue from royalties. And nobody among his crop of entrepreneurs is thinking small.

The program, Cyclotron Road, has enrolled a small group of scientists who are starting research in energy-related areas like the conversion of tidal waves to electricity and the transformation of carbon dioxide emissions into liquid fuel.