What Will the Future Bring

Lesson 3 - Technologies Can Find Applications in Many Other Markets 

The next step in practicing open innovation with integrated science allows us to extend technology platforms into new market spaces. This requires an increased understanding and further development of the underlying technologies which help us see the opportunities in new applications and in entirely new markets. 

The extension of the sulfonylurea technology platform was one example of how platform building is an important business activity. Another example is found with our digital ink technology, where applications have just begun. 

We will continue platform extensions, taking Nafion fluoropolymer membranes from chloralkali cells and catalysts to advanced fuel cells, and Kapton polyimide film from flat electronic computer circuits to complex flexible circuits in cell 

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Vincenti F. 2007. Costimulation blockade - what will the future bring Nephrol Dial Transplant 22 1293-1296. 

What will the future bring Certainly whilst the use of curable rubbers may grow as more of the world becomes developed, it will not grow at the same rate as the usage of elastomeric materials generally. Thermoplastic elastomers, as their properties are improved, will replace eurable elastomers in many areas currently the preserve of the cured materials. 

W. R. EPPERLY I would like to say that I think all of us here, as well as the people with whom we communicate and work, have the responsibility to stress the lead time that is required. I don t think the lead time is very well understood. At the very least, that will bring about a greater appreciation of the need to try to project what the future supply and demand situation will be on a much more than a one-year or a five-year basis. 

Okayama, Japan. He reported his new enzyme system in 2002, which he had extracted from a bacterium. This will convert starch to trehalose in high yields, bringing down its cost to 1% of what it had been when it was extracted from natural sources such as yeast. Hayashibara also reported that trehalose suppresses human body odour, especially that given off by old people who produce the somewhat odorous chemicals 2-nonenal and 2-octenal41)in their skin. When they use a 2% solution of trehalose as a body lotion it reduces the emission of these smelly compounds by about 70%. Maybe one day it will find cosmetic uses and no doubt be added to deodorants and body lotions, as the following advert from the future shows ... 

To strike a balance, structural information will be presented only for those cases of direct relevance to the photoinitiated reactions, namely (i) a few examples of CO2-HX and N2O-HX spectra in which large, qualitative differences can be seen, (ii) a compilation of all experimentally derived distances and angles, and (iii) comparisons to calculated values, when a combination of experiment and theory is needed to draw conclusions. What has been rather absent so far in studies of weakly bonded complexes, is information about systems involving heavy atoms. It is true that species like iodine and bromine do not necessarily bring joy to the lives of electronic structure theorists, but these are the systems most amenable to the experimental photoinitiated reaction studies. Also, the possibility of marked differences for seemingly homologous series makes quantitative evaluations imperative. Our discovery of the qualitative structural difference between CO2-HCI and C02-HBr underscores this point [34]. As pragmatists, we were able to quickly exploit this difference, but more importantly, it may be possible in the future to systematically use such differences to examine different photochemical entrance channels. 

In closing, we cannot help but wonder as we head for the 21st century what advances the next 15 years will bring in discovering, defining, and exploiting specific sites for insecticide action. The future of this area is as unpredictable as ever, but it is reasonable to hope that we shall see new natural products as insecticide models, new sites of action defined, such as... 

What will be the response of the oil-rich countries to this developing situation They may decide to restrict production for political reasons, to extend the life of their reserves or to force up the price of oil products. Even if there were a desire to expand production at the rate needed to meet market demand, this might not prove possible either practically or in terms of capital requirements. Whatever the outcome, it is almost bound to result in rapidly escalating prices. For a long time, the price of a barrel of oil (42 US gallons) was around US 20—25, but from 2005 onwards there has been a dramatic increase to over US 60. Rather than falling back to lower levels, it is widely forecast that, in the medium-term, oil prices will continue to spiral upwards. To bring future demand back into line with the supplies available, a five- or ten-fold increase in the price of a barrel of oil is certainly possible and this may well occur within 10—20 years, a short timeframe. It is salutary to recall that at US 20, the price until fairly recently, a barrel of oil cost about the same as a... 

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