Assisting companies with their innovation challenges requires a willingness to adopt novel approaches. Georges Seurat’s ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’ (illustrated) is an excellent example of applying this concept in art, whereby the overall effect is achieved using a novel technique, in this case pointillism.
With the benefit of my many years’ hands-on experience of product innovation, I can come up with novel and practical ways of combining many individual ‘dots’ – research results, prior art, physical and chemical principles, material properties – to produce items of beauty and value. These skills are valued by technical and commercial staff tasked with developing iconic products, and I’m happy to share them with you.
In the world of science in general (and polymer science in particular), a lot of emphasis is often placed on technical expertise and knowledge. That’s absolutely right, but I also believe that creativity – and especially the ability to make connections between existing studies and new challenges – is crucial to developing successful products in crowded marketplaces.
I use intuition, lateral thinking and well-established techniques for inventive problem-solving to help my clients ‘take a step back’ and identify ways of fulfilling a market need that they may not have considered. Or indeed, identify a new market need entirely.
In doing this, I avoid relying on over-hyped technologies, and instead effectively link new developments to commercial opportunity in less obvious ways that others may not consider.
