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.
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