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MESSAGE ON A BOTTLE Brand-master DuPont is
breaking down barriers between business units to develop the
next wave of custom materials.
DUPONT PHOTO |
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"The ultimate commodity is probably a head of lettuce," says Peter
Dulcamara, R&D director for technology licensing and catalysts
at Dow Chemical. "Before 1990, the sales of bagged lettuce were
virtually nothing, but over the last decade lettuce has grown to
be a $2 billion business. That's because people have taken commodity
carrots, lettuce, and radishes; sliced them up; and put them in
the same bag. The convenience of that formulation has created tremendous
value. We are seeing a similar phenomenon in specialty chemicals."
Dulcamara, who until this year was R&D director for industrial
chemicals at Dow, says that, while specialty chemicals have largely
become "small-volume commodities," custom formulation has emerged
as a means of developing differentiated products that command
a price premium. While only a handful of fundamentally new molecules
have entered the specialty arena over the past 20 years, "the
power of chemistry is virtually untapped," given what can be done
in the lab to solve problems with ingredients already at hand,
Dulcamara says. The key is getting down to work with individual
customers, developing a formulated chemical means of solving specific
problems.
Across the spectrum in specialties, companies have stopped
bemoaning the "commoditization" of their sector and have begun
looking at the upside possibilities of customization. Sunil Kumar,
chief executive officer of International Specialty Products, for
example, uses an analogy similar to Dulcamara's: the upscale coffee
shop. Think of the variety of choices scrawled across the blackboard
at Starbucks as opposed to a tank of plain black coffee filling
millions of "I Love New York" cups. The idea, which has also worked
with hamburgers, is to create a brand by letting the customers
have it their way.
The ultimate extension of this strategy, according to Kumar
and others, is for a specialties firm to develop not its own brand,
but a brand for its customer--to provide, say, the formulation
system for a hair styling product that is the basis for a new
product line.
Dulcamara says Dow increasingly views product development in
specialties as a matter of customer brand enhancement. "Sometimes
they want improvements that are invisible to their customer,"
he says, "and sometimes they want to be able to make advertising
claims."
Dow is putting its high-throughput and combinatorial chemistry
strengths to work on developing multiple iterations of customers'
formulations in order to pinpoint possibilities for cost and efficiency
improvements, Dulcamara says. "Our combinatorial capabilities
were developed for polymer catalyst development," he says. "Dow
has moved this technology into trying to understand the kinetics
of making chemicals and the combination of functional ingredients."
DuPont, which has a long tradition of customer collaboration
in developing specialties and materials, has stepped up its efforts
lately by pooling the resources of its specialty and materials
businesses, according to Denise Edmonds, product manager for ethylene
copolymers. "Before, each DuPont business would work with customers
within its own capabilities," she says. "Now we are bringing in
the full breadth of offerings from across the organization."
The company has, for example, launched an effort called DuPont
Packaging Solutions that recently developed Cool2Go, a thermal
retention labeling system that keeps the contents of plastic or
other containers cooler or hotter longer.
Like Dulcamara, Edmonds sees custom formulation as a bulwark
against commoditization. "There are still opportunities in specialties,"
she says, "developing new technologies to better meet customer
needs."
Dulcamara adds that there is always the possibility of fundamentally
new specialty molecules emerging as large companies such as Dow
and DuPont continue to evolve. "Dow started as an inorganic chemical
company based on bromine," he says. "It branched into organic
chemistry, polymer chemistry, and materials science. Next is an
evolution into biotech, nanotechnology, and the cognitive sciences.
That's where we're going to see new specialty materials come from."--RICK
MULLIN |
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