Competitors’ research interests

Johnson Johnson researchers say that they currently have no explanation for this unexpected response to Eprex . Interestingly enough, no similar immune response has been observed with either another of Johnson Johnson s recombinant erythropoietins, Procrit , or with a competitor s comparable product, Amgen s Epogen . 

But the interest which major firms like ICI, Bayer, or even Hoechst still have in the sector is restricted by the small number of additives they supply to plastic producers. Under the circumstances, it is more than likely that Ciba-Geigy s lead in the variety of products offered, in research, in customer service, or in geographic coverage will be hard for competitors to catch up with. Indeed, their narrow approach to the market would hardly warrant the heavy investment to fulfill any high ambitions they might have in the area. 

The question arises whether there is any incentive for an employed researcher to patent an invention, apart from the contractual obligation to do so as an employee. Filing and defending a patent often results in a lot of additional work for the inventor which in the case of a patent defense may be related to work done months or years before, while the inventor s research proceeded in the meantime. Publications on the subject and on later improvements may be held back in order to avoid supporting potential competitors. Thus the interest of a researcher to patent an invention interferes with the interest to publish and to turn the attention to new research fields. Specific measures by the employer, for example a bonus for a successful patent application or other awards, but at least an adequate recognition of the achievement should be considered as incentive for inventors. In this context it is noteworthy that a rather unique law in Germany entitles inventors to compensation payments by the employer. 

Chemical manufacturers who license their competitors can of course expect to meet them in the marketplace. The more conservative attitude of old-line companies in the past was based on a desire to maintain the advantages of their novel advances at least until their research and development costs had been recouped, and this is, of course, the principle behind the seventeen-year monopoly inherent in a U.S. patent. The recent change of view towards licensing can be attributed first to the increased availability and attractiveness of the opportunities, but also to an appreciation of the constant threat of process obsolescence. Modern enlightened self-interest, with its emphasis on the time value of money, tends to choose the course with the assured payout and let the salesman handle the market problems as they occur. 

Unlike consumer goods such as cars and clothes, most commercial chemical products are faceless (e.g., hydrochloric acid, polyethylene), and as a rule the customer is therefore only interested in sales incentives such as price, quality, and availability. All the research activities of an industrial enterprise must therefore ultimately boil down to three basic competitive advantages, namely, being cheaper and/or better and/or faster than the competitor. The AND combination offers the greatest competive advantage and is thus known as the world-champion strategy. Flowever, more often one must settle for the OR combination. The qualitive term cheaper can be quantified by means of a production cost analysis. Initially, it is sufficient to examine the coarse structure of the production costs. Thus, each item in Table 1-2 can be analysed individually and the... 

Today, attention focuses on three application areas LC-MS is mainly applied in the pharmaceutical industry but also plays an important role in environmental analysis and natural-product analyses, i.e. in biochemical and biotechnological research. In addition, there is large-scale use of LC-MS in industrial research, where the analysis and elucidation of compound mixtures of personal care products, detergents and cleaning agents, etc., i.e. unknown mixtures of polar and nonpolar compounds, produced by competitors are of great interest In aU these applications in which polar compounds are involved, LC-MS has become the method of choice. 

From the investor s perspective, risk management can be implemented by credit research, which focuses on the analysis of creditworthiness of a company. As a first step, the company s sector(s) is screened. If a sector is sensitive to economic changes, it is strongly affected by a slowdown. So cyclical sectors tend to have lower average creditworthiness than more resistant sectors. Additionally, the competitive situation within the sector is of interest. To assess this situation criteria like the number of competitors, their market shares, their strategies, and strengths have to be scrutinized. 

An interest in sports or a particular skill in sports can be helpful in the field of sports engineering. In some cases, athletes will go on to become sports engineers. For example, British aerospace engineer and Olympic skeleton competitor Kristan Bromley has done research on sled design to optimize performance. 

The focus of research in this area has trended increasingly towards mineralization as an objective, with BDD as the anode material of greatest interest. Small-scale conunercial cells incorporating BDD electrodes have recently become available. As a competitor to biological oxidation, electrochemical oxidatimi offers the prospective advantages of treatment in a one-pass flow-through reactor, in which even modest... 

While the research demonstrates that horizontal networks in the supermarket sector are an interesting idea and could serve as an important alternative for the sustainabihty of small and medium-sized supermarkets, the study also showed that it is not simple to transform this joint action into reality. This type of partnership requires a high level of maturity among the key partners to surpass the many barriers of working with competitors. 

Additionally, the allelopathic potential of rice plants can be stimulated in the presence of other plants by increasing the production of allelochemicals that may help them repress the growth of competitors. The synthesis of some rice allelochemicals, such as flavone and cyclohexenone, can be stimulated in the presence of bamyardgrass nearby [117]. This has not been demonstrated for alkyl resorcinols however, our interest in other lipid resorcinol-derived allelochemicals, such as those produced in sorghum [85], has led our research group to identify, clone and characterize the substrate specificity of the key enzymes involved in the synthesis of the rice lipid resorcinols (unpublished data). 

Researchers fundamentally interested in C-C bond-forming methods for polyketide synthesis have at times viewed allylation methods as alternatives, and maybe even competitors, to aldol addition reactions. Both areas have dealt with similar stereochemical problems simple versus absolute stereocontrol, matched versus mismatched reactants. There are mechanistic similarities between both reaction classes open and closed transition states, and Lewis acid and base catalysis. Moreover, there is considerable overlap in the prominent players in each area boron, titanium, tin, silicon, to name but a few, and the evolution of advances in both areas have paralleled each other closely. However, this holds for an analysis that views the allylation products (C=C) merely as surrogates of or synthetic equivalents to aldol products (C=0). The recent advances in alkene chemistry, such as olefin metathesis and metal-catalyzed coupling reactions, underscore the synthetic utility and versatility of alkenes in their own right. In reality, allylation and aldol methods are complementary The examples included throughout the chapter highlight the versatility and rich opportunities that allylation chemistry has to offer in synthetic design. 

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