Technology-Push Opportunities

Figure 12.1 Product opportunities from market-puii and from technology-push...

The answer - and hence the challenge - is value driven innovation innovation driven by the changing environment, technological opportunity, and the consumer. Technology push will no longer suffice Innovation must be driven by consumer pull. 

This technology push has a high degree of dynamism. The chemical industry now has the opportunity to implement many new findings and research results in new products, to the benefit of economic and technological progress. The examples shown here serve to illustrate some of the emerging opportunities. 

Opportunity involves both supply-side and demand-side factors. On the supply side, technological gaps can exist (1) between the technology used in a particular firm and the already-available technology that could be adopted or adapted (known as diffusion or incremental innovation, respectively), and (2) the technology used in a particular firm and technology that could be developed (i.e., major or radical innovation). On the demand side, four factors could push firms towards technological... 

In some cases, production from an oil or natural gas reservoir can be enhanced by pumping C02 gas into the reservoir to push out the product, which is called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). The United States is the world leader in EOR technology, using about 32 million ton of C02 per year for this purpose. From the perspective of the sequestration program, EOR represents an opportunity to sequester carbon at low net cost, due to the revenues from recovered oil/gas. 

Despite the widespread sense of vast technological possibility (much of it imagined), the racist backdrop of genetic engineering provided little political opportunity in the era of civil rights for geneticists to push their social educational... 

As real as these challenges are, they are offset by the opportunities presented by the pursuit of sustainability. Much has been made of so-called disruptive technologies - the advances rewrite the basis of competition and force abrupt changes on markets and the companies that participate in them. Whenever a disruptive technological change occurs, companies that have pushed the advance, and others that have the capacity for rapid adaptation, enjoy dramatic successes. Slow-moving, backward-looking companies falter. 

Within the sulfur world, there is a notable example of pure market pull the replacement of elemental sulfur by pyrites after the TAC incident. An unprecedented feature was the speed of the entire process, from the technical development to its penetration into a global industry. The stage had been perfectly set. The new technology was fairly easy to develop and implement. The special feature was that the customers detested the current supplier. The sulfur world had more than its fair share of these market-pull technology advances the Frasch process is another notable example. That is not to say that sulfur scientists are more market oriented than others. Quite the opposite, the driving force has often been the poor performance of the sulfur industry, which creates these rare maiket-pull opportunities. Instead of being labeled market-pull situations, fundamentally they should more properly be tagged supplier push ... 

Composites are widely used in such diverse areas as transportation, construction, electronics and consumer products. They offer unusual combinations of stiffness, strength and weight that are difficult to attain separately from the individual components. The advent of nanoscience and nanotechnologies has continuously provided the impetus pushing for the development of materials with fascinating properties and a rich variety of applications. Polymer-clay (PC) nanocomposites represent a new class of materials based on reinforcement of polymeric materials by dispersion of nano-scale clay particles at molecular level in the polymer matrix. Because of their nanometer size features, nanocomposites possess unique properties typically not shared by their more conventional miaocomposite counterparts and therefore offer new technology and business opportunities. 

Historically, science-push explanations of technical change came up after the Second World War, when the United States had built up a sophisticated public and private science system and at the same time succeeded on the world market. As has been nc4ed above there is evidence that the United States did not command scientific knowledge over Europe, see Vernon (1971), Schmookler (1966), Franko (1976), Hufbauer (1966). This is the search-and-selection model introduced by evolutionary theories of technical change, see Nelson and Winter (1982) firms innovate on the basis of technological opportunities and the users select a variant that proved to yield the highest benefit for them. 

An increased focus on renewable energy is also opening up opportunities for adhesives manufacturers. The push towards a viable renewable energy source has brought solar photovoltaic power technology to the forefront, and manufacturing of solar panels is forecast to emerge into one of the most crucial application areas for adhesives. 

---