(274c) Successful Commercialization Involves More Than a Great Idea

Successful commercialization involves the efficient and predictable evolution of a great idea to a commercial process having the delivers the desired economic and environmental impact. Success requires bringing together and meshing expertise from multiple areas to leverage existing knowledge and address critical issues. In a corporate environment this can be challenging due to separation of expertise by business functions with specific roles and responsibilities operating within a culture that views commercialization as a series of individual events with distinct hand-offs between each event.

Over my 35+ years focused on process development, scale-up, implementation, and improvement I have observed too many delays and failures to develop and implement chemical technology due to misunderstandings of critical issues and assumptions and allocating scarce resources to reinvent what is already known. This presentation will focus on how to effectively gather and engage input and expertise from all the key areas required to develop and implement a commercially successful technology. Each commercialization is unique in specific critical issues and expertise required to address them. It is important to avoid prematurely determining the make‑up and resource allocation of a commercialization team which can lead to biases, bad assumptions, and unrealistic timelines. Real life examples will be shared to exemplify several commercialization scenarios and how a collaborative and parallel approach is often superior to an approach based on a series of isolated pieces handed off from one person/group to another.