Chemical companies seeking to survive the challenges of the future should rethink their traditional approach to innovation. It may require harnessing innovation by leveraging advances in digital and materials science and technology, working with ecosystem partners, and focusing on business model acumen. Innovation remains one of the main drivers of sustainable growth in the chemical industry. But chemical companies’ old ways of innovating and the status quo may no longer be an option. That’s because the industry has changed dramatically, and there may be more to come. So what has changed? The answer lies in the rise of digital technologies used in materials informatics and open digital platforms. The value is shifting from the traditional research and development department of chemical enterprises to the material information platform. Until now, the process of finding and developing new chemicals has remained largely unchanged and has been largely laboratory-based. This makes it difficult to predict the behavior of materials under new conditions and requires many laboratory experiments, which are often expensive, inefficient and time-consuming. There is often a disconnect between the acceleration of market change and the slowness of the innovation process.
To address this challenge, a new startup at the intersection of materials science and computer science, called Materials Informatics, is envisioning open digital platforms. These platforms are able to accumulate vast amounts of material knowledge from diverse sources into a single, reliable, searchable format and harness machine learning algorithms to quickly and efficiently develop new innovations.
More broadly, digital technology is changing the basis of competition by unlocking potential value and making markets more accessible. The applicability of advanced digital technologies is even more important in the circumstances the world now faces. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technology can help quickly redesign products to reduce costs in line with the ever-changing supply chain. For example, startups using artificial intelligence (AI) to support material innovation are discovering low-cost formulations in less than three months by evaluating, optimizing, and absorbing ingredient formulations and domain knowledge.
