Revitalizing Innovation

As the flow of new chemical molecules dries up, the chemical industry needs to look to other sources of innovation in addition to traditional chemical research, and also ensure that it captures the maximum value of each innovation. In order to do both successfully, chemical companies have to break down their traditional inward orientation, determine explicit strategies for innovation, and mimic the business patterns and mentality of successful venture capitalists and new startups to take advantage of outside resources. Among the attractive new technological sources of innovation that they should explore are biotechnology and e-commerce (see Chapters 6 and 7). 

This chapter examines how chemical companies should develop new innovation strategies and some practical routes to their implementation. 

Without much exaggeration, the last century could be called the century of chemical innovation. Plastics and other synthetically synthesized molecules and materials changed most industrial and consumer markets tremendously by systematically replacing natural products like paper, wood, or cotton and making completely new applications possible. 

However, in the last two to three decades of the twentieth century the innovative force of the chemical industry slowed down. Far fewer reaUy new molecules were developed and the change in properties compared with those of existing materials became incremental. In addition, key markets have become saturated and production costs are getting closer to core costs. In this environment, many chemical companies are in desperate need of iimovation to generate the profitable growth which is a major driver of their stock value (see Chapter 3). 

However, small startup firms have cornered the markets here, while established companies are strugghng to maintain their innovative edge, and the same applies to the chemical industry. Innovations in e-commerce and in biotechnology have started to change the game completely in some chemical businesses, such as agrochemicals, but most of these originate with startups, and not with the big estab-hshed chemical companies. 

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Four crucial factors could help to ease the leap from a hydrocarbon to a nuclear era regulating carbon emissions, revamping the fuel cycle, revitalizing innovation in nuclear technology, and replacing gasoline with hydrogen. 

In our belief and experience, innovation is driven by a combination of deep knowledge, creative new approaches, and the perseverance to follow through. In this section, we focus on how these three elements can be used as the key motifs for making the revitalization of innovation a more tangible and operational goal. 

The chemical industry has to revitalize the drivers of innovation to proactively generate sustainable competitive advantage. Innovative breakthroughs can happen in a variety of dimensions, including not only new compounds, applications, and processes, but also new services and business models. 

Companies driven by innovation revitalize the market for everyday products by using novel material science to eliminate problems that most customers despise, but have resigned themselves to accept through a lack of product performance. 

The regulation of stereochemistry in radical polymerization has thus far proved enormously challenging, being the subject of more than 50 years of intense and innovative research. The relatively recent development of living radical polymerization has revitalized interest in stereocontrol, as the lack of tacticity control is now the greatest obstacle to the synthesis of precisely controlled macromolecules by highly versatile and efficient radical-based processes. Lewis acids (LAs) have been employed in an attempt to... 

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