In our previous series of posts we have been discussing how to get technology from the research phase to the product development stage and ultimately to the market.  So why have we spent this much time on the topic?  Innovation drives growth.  Cost cutting doesn’t.  When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 he assessed the situation by saying “The cure for Apple is not cost cutting.  The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”  That statement should be a rallying cry for companies facing an uncertain future.  Looking back, it is clear that Apple figured out how to innovate.

A recent article in the May 2012 Harvard Business Review by Ann Marie Knott entitled “The Trillion-Dollar R&D Fix” presented evidence that many big name companies are seriously under spending on R&D and that it is costing them profits and growth.  She completed a simulation that showed if the top 20 firms traded on the US exchanges had optimized their R&D spending in 2010 using her mathematical simulation, the collective increase in the market cap would have been an astonishing $1 trillion.  Wow.  It’s a great article, so head on over to HBR.org if you want more details.

So what is innovation?  My former company (ICI) used to call innovation “the successful commercialization of invention.”  Another is “innovation is the process of successfully identifying, developing and implementing new ideas which create value.”  There are many more in the same theme, with the literature consensus is that innovation requires three main components:

1. Creativity
2. Execution
3. Added value

So how then did Apple “out-innovate” so many companies?  Did Apple invent the PC? Did Apple invent the mp3 player? Did Apple invent downloadable music content? Did Apple invent the cell phone? Did Apple invent the tablet computer? The answer is no to all of these.  In innovation terms, Apple is a fabulously successful “fast follower.”  The genius was to integrate design and ease of use into their products.

So looking at the three elements above, what did Apple do to create such a powerhouse corporation?  There is no doubt about Apple’s creativity.  The user experience is just wonderful.  I remember the first time I used my brand new iPod, downloaded iTunes, ripped in some of my favorite music CD’s and plugged in the iPod.  Bingo!  Everything sync’d easily and it was so simple.  Next came the iPhone and iPad, again, the designs are elegant and the user-friendly aspects are unreal.  Apple has gotten a lot of flak over their suppliers (mainly the Foxconn subcon in China), but they are masters at execution.

And finally, nobody has to ask about did they deliver value.  Just look at the sales and stock price!  So how can you learn from Apple?

This is the final post in the 8 part series and here we will explore how to rapidly exploit all of the hard, but focused work you have done to build a robust product architecture.  Using the electrically conductive adhesive example, let’s say your first product was a fast cure, but required a high cure temperature.  Your first customers like the faster curing times which saves them money due to increased throughput, but they want to get additional energy savings using a lower cure temperature.  And as long as you are making a modification, the market needs a higher electrical conductivity as well.

In the “old days” a typical formulator would search existing products for something close to the customers CTQ’s and then start tweaking the formulation by adding ingredients to lower the cure temperature and increase the electrical conductivity.  This was the trial and error method, since most of the time there was little understanding of how the original formulation actually worked.

Since we have been using a product architecture approach, it is likely that during the architecture development, an understanding of the key factors governing cure speed and electrical conductivity were developed.  Remember we called these technology platforms such as the curing agents and conductivity promoters, such as the components on the left side in the figure above.  The beauty of product architectures is that the main components of the formulation are already in place, so the formulation scientist does not have to start from scratch.  Being able to modify an existing product architecture has the following advantages:

• Shortens development time for product modifications
• Enables rapid product line extensions if required
• Uses existing manufacturing processes
• Leverages a known, robust product architecture (product architectures are extensively tested during the initial development to ensure consistent performance at the customer)

We have spent the last 8 posts talking in detail about how to use a systematic process to enable formulation science.  For many, this may seem like a cumbersome and slower way to develop products.  It takes a major thinking shift in the beginning, but once you get your technology delivery process in place it actually takes less time to commercial revenues.  I have seen all too many times in the past where the formulators did a rush job to get a formulation out to the customer only to find major problems during qualification.  The customer has to wait while re-formulation occurs, then re-testing.  The many iterative loops take a lot of time and burn valuable goodwill with your customers.  If you have spend the right time upfront learning about your customers needs, then you will be ahead of them.  Wayne Gretzky once said “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”  If you drive your technology delivery system to produce products where the customers are going to be, then you will enjoy much commercial success.

I just finished a post on using Mixture Design of Experiments to accelerate the development of complex formulated mixtures such as adhesive, composites, coatings, etc.  This made me think of a nice example of how one chemist totally engaged in the process and developed a killer product that blew away the competition and enabled the customer to save millions of dollars and win some awards.  Nice.

We started Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) training with all of our formulation chemists.  When I looked around the room I could identify those that would embrace it immediately, those who would totally struggle, and those “on the fence.”  As the class evolved, one of my really bright chemists sat quietly in the class, asked good questions, but I thought he was one of those that would conclude “this is not for me.”  At some point in the class, and I think it was during the large section of DOE training that the light bulb went off.  He didn’t telegraph this, but went back to his lab and started using the tools.  And did he use the tools!

We were competing with a major competitor to be the first to develop a new product platform for a huge multi-national customer.  The stakes were high.  Not to worry since my “quiet chemist” was working formulation magic using a combination of factorial DOE’s and mixture DOE’s to develop a cutting edge new product.  He first started with his deep knowledge of the polymer chemistry required to meet the customer requirements and did some initial formulation work to establish the curing process and final properties with base chemistry (remember our discussion on product architectures? The base chemistry was one of  the key components of the product architecture he was building).  Once he got the curing and final properties in the right range, he needed to add fillers (another component of the product architecture).

He used a series of factorial DOE’s to optimize the application process (totally new way to use this particular product) and then used mixture designs (including response surfaces) to fine tune the formulation.  Once he quickly got a working product we sampled the customer to get early feedback.  After each customer trial he used statistical designs to further optimize the product.  Along the way a couple things happened.  He discovered some unexpected results from the mixture DOE’s resulting in a better formulation that met customer requirements.  The project required developing both a formulation and application process and using the statistical toolbox, he found some unexpected process/formulation interactions as well.  Interactions will kill you.

To make a long story short, we trounced our competitor, got qualified into a series of new products, and the entirely new product and process allowed the customer to save significant costs.  The project won an internal innovation award at the customer and our formulation project team lead by my “quiet chemist” won an innovation award as well.

The cat was out of the bag.  He wasn’t my “quiet chemist” any more and was a strong advocate for leveraging DFSS to optimize formulations, reduce development time, and develop a robust new products that customers love.

So what’s the bottom line?  In R&D, variation is good.  Unlike in manufacturing where variation is the enemy, when you get unexpected results (more variation) then using statistical tools like factorial designs and mixture designs allows you to exploit variation as an opportunity to learn.  Statistical designs don’t replace the chemistry and physics skills formulators need, but give them a very powerful toolset to leverage chemistry for the customer’s benefit.  Good stuff…

Or Debunking the Myths of Design for Six Sigma

We have been discussing how to use a formulation science approach to build product architectures by making sure our applied research efforts are developing the right technology platforms.  Critical stuff.  But what happens when you have completed the technology platforms and need to leverage them to build product architectures?

One of the myths I want to address right now is that using Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) tools does not replace the need to have highly skilled chemists who really understand the underlying chemistry.  The tools we will discuss are just that: tools to help leverage the chemistry in a systematic way to achieve the desired product attributes.  Traditional formulation chemists are highly skilled “executive chefs” when it comes to how they formulate a new product.  They have years of experience in the “excel spreadsheet in their head” and have an intuition on how to tailor the various ingredients in order to get the right performance.  But, formulations and the technical requirements are getting pretty demanding for the standard “one factor at a time” or OFAT approach to be both effective and timely.  So what is the alternative?

DFSS has a number of design tools that can improve both the development time and quality.

• Voice of the Customer or CTQ trees
• Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) used in the design phase
• Factorial Design of Experiments (DOE)
• Mixture Design of Experiments (Contour plots like above and response surface analysis below)

Chemists are great at having an “gut feel” for the main effects of most of the ingredients in a formulation (add a little more catalyst to get faster cure speed, a little more long chain oligomer to lower modulus, etc.), but it is very difficult to predict interactions.  The beauty of DOE is that using statistical designs you can gain a much deeper understanding of the chemistry causing both main effects and interactions, along with getting much more robust information of how the formulation space relates to final performance.

The mixture DOE is a very valuable tool in the formulators toolbox. One way to look at the results of a mixture DOE is to use response surfaces.  The mixture response surface plot on the left clearly shows how a particular physical response is a function of the composition in three dimensional space.  In the example on the left, if you wanted to maximize the polymer elongation, you would want to optimize your composition at the maximum and then along the ridge at the maximum.  But let’s say you were doing only OFAT experiments and you picked points on either side of the maximum.  You would erroneously conclude there is no effect, but the response surface analysis clearly shows that elongation has a complex response surface.  Herein lies the beauty of mixture DOE’s.  Exploiting response surface methodology in formulation science is a key enabler to reduce product development time and increase the robustness of the final formulated products.  By completing a series of optimization mixture designs, the formulator will learn more about the chemistry, develop a better product, and reduce time to market with improved profitability.  This stuff really works!

So far we have covered the basic components of the technology delivery system, where they fit into the process, and how to leverage resources to drive the product development process.  Let’s take a minute to drill down and look at how technology platforms are critically linked to product architectures.  Polymer formulations such as adhesives, resins systems for composites, coatings, etc. require multiple technologies for them to work properly.  Some of the key components of a polymer formulation are:

•  resin chemistry
• curing agents (thermal and UV)
• catalysts
• fillers
• additives and modifiers (adhesion promoters, surfactants, etc.)

The first step is to carefully examine the product architecture your customers or the market requires.  The next step is to start with the basic formulation components and assess what are the critical to function (or critical to quality, CTQ) attributes.  Most formulation work starts with the base resin system and curing package to get the right final physical properties and cure speed.

Let’s look at an example to make this tangible.  I was developing a new class of epoxy-based multilayer circuit board material and had the following CTQ’s:

• Increased glass transition temperature (Tg), lower moisture absorption, and lower dielectric constant and dielectric loss factor
• Faster curing and eliminate DICY (forms crystals which impedes curing)
• Improve dimensional consistency and ability to be laser drilled

From these focused set of material requirements it was clear that we needed to develop three new technology platforms.

1. New resins (evaluated epoxy, cyanate ester, bismaleimide, etc.)
2. Curing agents (investigated various types of imidazoles)
3. Reinforcements (improved woven glass cloth and non-woven aramid)

We built the resin technology platform internally with close support from the major resin suppliers. We used Open Innovation and partnered with a university to develop a fundamental understanding of imidazole curing agents.  Finally, we partnered with a glass cloth suppler to develop improved glass fabric that enhanced the reliability of the laminate.  By combining all three platforms, we were able to develop a new class of laser drilled laminate  (new resin from technology platform #1, faster curing from platform #2,  and non-woven aramid from platform #3).

Since we gained a fundamental understanding of the chemistry and physics underpinning each technology platform we were able to expertly apply our learning to rapidly develop several new products by simply utilizing the technology platforms to build new product architectures.

How will you use technology platforms to accelerate your product development efforts?

So we’ve talked about technology platforms, open innovation, and how to use a “loose” management approach when conducting applied research and developing technology platforms.  The most important aspect of building a robust new product development process is the concept of product architectures.

Product architectures have been used for a while, but don’t really get “a lot of press” in the innovation literature.  Product architectures are critical for formulated products such as:

• Adhesives
• Laminates
• Composites
• Coatings
• Electronic materials such as photoresists, underfills, protective coatings, mold compounds, glob tops etc.

Why is this concept so important in formulated products?  Since many ingredients typically make up commercial formulated products, it is critical to understand the main effects, interactions, and synergies of the multiple components in a formulation.  Additionally, by reducing the formulation complexity, you can reduce manufacturing costs, simplify the supply chain, improve reliability, and develop better products.  I challenged one of my teams to develop a new line of adhesives and reduce the formulations complexity at the same time.  Typical formulations had anywhere from 16-20 ingredients.  The team successfully developed product architectures with 7 components and the products actually performed better.  The benefits were:

• Simplified the supply chain by only having to source 7 ingredients
• Reduced manufacturing complexity by only mixing 7 components which saved time and reduced the potential for errors
• Delivered to the market a more robust and more reliable product.  Customer complaints on the new product line were reduced by 50%, savings to both the company and improved goodwill with the customer.

So, what is a product architecture?  Think of it as a “blueprint” for a new product.  The automobile industry has been using this concept for decades.  Think about engines, braking systems, suspensions, frames, etc.  The collection of systems that make up the car is a product architecture.  OK, buy how does that relate to polymers and formulations?  Good question. Let’s take a look at an example of the product architecture for a conductive adhesive:

On the left side are the technology platforms that make up the architecture.  Each of the technology platforms provides a key performance characteristic in the formulation.  For example, the resin chemistry can be epoxy, or acrylate, or maleimide, or cyanate ester chemistry depending on the type of application.  Depending on the substrate to be adhered on there can be a variety of adhesion promoters.  The type of curing agent can be selected to control the cure time or temperature.  The technology platforms provide ranges for each of the technologies so as you can see on the right, a product architecture can be built to provide various iterations (fast cure, low temp cure, etc.) from the same basic product architecture.  The mixing process or order of addition or other key process technology can also be developed as a technology platform and used to build product architectures.  The beauty of this approach is that if you build product architectures correctly, it is easy to quickly respond to customer or market demands and make fast product modifications or product line extensions.

In the upcoming posts we will discuss how to integrate technology platforms into product architectures and discuss some critically important design tools that can greatly enhance your ability to quickly build robust product architectures.  Yes, I am talking about reducing the total product development cycle time while delivering  better, market-focused new products.

In our last post we discussed the importance of developing customer focused enabling technology platforms as a key enabler to accelerate new product development.  But, this can be a daunting task.  What if your polymer markets are quickly changing or radical new technologies are required to remain competitive? What if you don’t have all of the right skills in your R&D organization?  Many companies are using Open Innovation to gain access to technology that most likely would take too long to develop internally.  So what is Open Innovation?

Open Innovation is a term promoted by Henry Chesbrough, a professor and executive director at the Center for Open Innovation at UC Berkeley, in his book Open Innovation: the new imperative for creating and profiting from technology¹. The main concept of open innovation is expanding the boundaries of your company and looking outside for some of your technical solutions. Open innovation is not new, but has become a necessity with the acceleration of new product development and the increasing breadth of technology required for truly innovative products.

So let’s look at some examples of how Open Innovation can enhance your product development projects.  In an adhesives company, the R&D team had to respond to market drivers for an improved electrically conductive adhesive used in electronics.  The filler was a key component of the formulation and the company had very close partnerships with their filler suppliers. The R&D teams in both companies worked together to develop technologies to get to very high electrical conductivities. In this case, the use of specific chemicals were required to prepare the filler surfaces so that during the adhesive curing effective particle-particle packing was achieved leading to high electrical conductivity. The company went outside their internal R&D group and partnered with a leading filler supplier to get the right technology for the specific application.

An example of leveraging technology that you have already developed is to actively pursue licensing agreements. IBM has a very active licensing program that yields over a billion dollars of revenue per year. Honeywell, Boeing, and many others have also profited from lucrative licensing agreements. This is a true win-win. The company that develops the technology gets to recoup some of their R&D investment and the licensee benefits from reduced time to market and access to needed technology.

One caveat before we close. Open innovation requires an investment, both in time and resources. Many companies today have what can be called “technology scouts” who spend full-time working to identify, evaluate, and develop open innovation pathways. Additionally, when I was a researcher, I had to spend time and work closely with my two university programs. If you don’t invest in resources to drive and manage open innovation, you won’t get the results you wanted.

Open innovation is a necessity in today’s fast paced markets.  If you want to accelerate technology platform and product development, find a way to embrace it and make it work for your company.

__________

1) Henry Chesbrough, “Open Innovation, the New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology,” Harvard Business School Press, 2003

For long-term and sustainable product development, careful attention needs to be spent on the front end of the development process.  Industry trends, technology roadmaps, customer input can all play an important role in defining your applied research goals and objectives.  Technology platforms can help to reduce complexity, accelerate game changing product development, and help leverage your R&D efforts and resources by using technology platforms across multiple products or product architectures.

Examples of an enabling technology platforms in the polymer industry:

• base resin technology, such as new monomers or oligomers for formulated products
• filler technology for physical property enhancements such a nanofillers, clays, silica, thermally conductive fillers
• curing agents or accelerators for thermoset curing resins
• new UV curing agents, or unique utilization of existing technology
• innovative new process technology

When I was at IBM, our technology roadmaps required both new curing systems for epoxy circuit board resins and entirely new thermosetting resins.  My major research goals were to develop a new curing agent platform and investigate new base resins for semiconductors substrates and laminates.  Specifically, I worked to develop a fundamental understanding of various types of curing agents for epoxy that increased the cure speed, improved the physical properties, and were robust in manufacturing.  Another part of the research was identifying new epoxy-based resins with improved dielectric and mechanical properties.  These were two separate technology platforms and when completed were used in the product development work to design a new line of resins.  Let’s look at the technology development flow and focus on the “front-end:”

The technology platform development can occur either in your internal R&D organization (most common) but there can be some other very valuable resources you can access to accelerate technology platform development.  We will talk about how to leverage Open Innovation in technology platform development in the next post.  One of the key aspects of making technology platforms effective is having a close working relationship with the product development teams that are closely coupled with customers or market drivers.  The success of the technology delivery system is making sure the right technology platforms are under development, have clearly identified timelines and that once developed they have a “home” in the product development team.  This type of coordination is not easy and it takes a lot of effort to make sure the “R” part of the R&D is focused on building product technology platforms that will solve customer/market needs..  When done correctly this results in technology platforms that are “customer pull” oriented versus “technology push.”

If you have a technology platform development challenge, contact InnoCentrix at 877-887-6596 and let’s discuss how we can accelerate your technology delivery process.

In a technology driven enterprise (like most polymer companies) having the right management approach in the early technology development phase is critical to get creativity and risk taking flowing.  In the research or technology development work, failures are common, but remember “failures are opportunities to learn.”  Research scientists will conduct many experiments learning incrementally as the project progresses.  Since it is very difficult to map out timelines, this poses a management challenge.  Customers are relentless in their demands for newer, better, cheaper products and they want them fast.  Being closely coupled with the customer or market segments is critical to ensure you have the right technology platforms in the development pipeline.  Let’s look at the overall technology development flow:

During the applied research and technology platform development phases there is a lot of uncertainty in how the work will progress.  Some of the most important polymer inventions were a result of unexpected experimental outcomes.  Teflon was discovered completely by accident by Dr. Roy Plunkett at DuPont Central Research labs.  Finding a white powder in a tetrafluoroethylene gas cylinder was totally unexpected, but he had the foresight to analyze the properties.  He discovered  the substance was heat resistant and chemically inert, and had very low surface energy so that most other substances would not adhere to it.  His discovery and subsequent exploration led to the commercialization of DuPont Teflon® now widely used in many anti-stick applications.

With this in mind, I advocate a “loose” management style in the technology development phase (or the “R” in R&D) to allow scientists to explore and have some freedom to follow unexpected leads.  Technology managers must also realize that there are timelines to meet product development targets, so this is not an open invitation to just “play around.”  Finding the right balance is one of the toughest management challenges in product development.  Once you have your technology platforms completed, then with the transition to development of product architectures and ultimately new products requires a “flexible but tight” management approach.  To the right of the bar in the figure is typically where a phase/gate (or Stage-Gate®) process is used.  In this part of the product development process, there needs to be a bit more structure and timelines to ensure on-time delivery to the market or customers.

In the next post, we will discuss the details of technology platforms and give some examples of how technology platforms enable the creation of product architectures.

If you have a technology development challenge, contact InnoCentrix at 877-887-6596 and we can discuss how to delight your customers with great new products.

New product development is hard work and requires a system or process to provide guidelines or a framework.  If you are developing only incremental product improvements, then consider two things; 1) you don’t need a technology delivery system and 2) you won’t be in business for the long haul!  No matter how big or small your company is, you need to have a robust technology delivery system.  So what does this mean?  Let’s jump right in and have a look.

New product development activities can be divided up into a couple of different types;

1. Product enhancements (small incremental “tweeks” of current products like a faster curing epoxy)
2. Product line extensions (halogen free plastic or epoxy with environmentally friendly flame retardants)
3. New to the company products (adding formulated products like thermoset adhesives if you are primarily a raw resin manufacturer)
4. New to the world products (brand new polymer molecules)

If you are focused on only product enhancements, then you will need to be proficient at product development and incremental technology improvements.  When your strategy includes product line extensions and new to the company products, then you must have a well-defined Technology Delivery System.  The process is outlined at a high level below:

In order to deliver new product line extensions, this is most easily done if your process is focused on the development of Product Architectures.  The process begins with Basic and Applied Research.  Most companies today only conduct applied research, specifically focused on developing the required Technology Platforms.  Using Open Innovation is a good strategy to get access to basic and applied research at universities, government labs, industry consortia, etc.  Technology Platforms contain the key technologies required to build Product Architectures.  A key part of the new product development process is building Product Architectures.  From Product Architectures, it is easy to develop both line extensions and product enhancements in a fraction of the time.  The work flow in the process above typically starts at Technology Platform development if you have access to internal applied research capabilities.  One of the key aspects of developing high margin new products is to have differentiated technologies in your products.  In the next series of posts we will discuss in more detail Technology Platforms and Product Architectures and the management required to effectively navigate the Technology Delivery System.

If you need to develop a new technology or need an independent assessment of your technology delivery process, visit the InnoCentrix website or contact us at 877-887-6596.