Market-Pull, Search for Technology

In this mode of discovery, the path starts from the identification of a market that is not well served by the current products available, or the more ambitious path of the identification of a potential market that presently does not exist. The task for the investigator is to discover interesting technology leads, and to design a product that targets this market segment. Perhaps we can modify a current product to make it better, perhaps we can find a neglecfed material that is not currently used, or perhaps we can create a new synthetic material. 

In a modern corporation with an established research and development department, the normal mode of product development begins with the realization that a current product has some undesirable properties, and modifications are needed to improve these properties. The product engineer is given a specific assignment on which properties to improve, and then searches among the available methods to modify the product. Let us look at a number of historical examples of the modification of existing products. 

The use of rubber for sports balls and for waterproofing fabric had been noted by Christopher Columbus in his voyages to America, but the results had not been satisfactory (Asimov 1989). Natural rubber is a polymer of the isoprene molecule (CsHs) with molecular weight in the order of 200,000, and consists of thousands of chains with short side chains. 

Rubber becomes brittle in cold weather and tacky in hot weather, and it is odorous and perishable. It also has very low tensile strength and low resistance to abrasion. One of the major advances in the improvement of rubber was in the discovery by Charles Macintosh in Scotland in 1820 that coal-tar naphtha is a cheap and effective solvent for rubber. He placed a solution of rubber and naphtha between two fabrics, and in so doing he covered up the sticky or brittle surfaces that had been common in earlier single-texture garments treated with rubber. Macintosh patented the process in 1823. These double-textured waterproof cloaks, which were first introduced to the public in 1824, have been known ever since as mackintoshes. 

The formulas of salicylic acid, salol, and acetylsalicylic acid are given below to show the structural modifications that turned an unsatisfactory product into a much better product. 

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