The importance of building a knowledge base through fundamental, pre-competitive research
Markus Gahleitner (Borealis) and Rein Borggreve (DPI) are both highly experienced research managers. They share their views on the benefit of investing in research beyond product-oriented studies. Because optimising your product and satisfying your customers’ needs – as relevant as it might be – is not always enough.
“The thing is,” says Markus Gahleitner, Senior Group Expert Polyolefins at Borealis, “there are cases where you really need to understand why your customer has a certain urgent issue. In particular when the application is close to the limits of your material, you often encounter phenomena that can only be resolved through deep, fundamental insights. To use a medical comparison: if the disease requires surgery, an aspirin will not help. It’s a huge risk to mistake a symptom for the actual problem. And some of these problems can be what I call vampire problems: if you don’t kill them completely, they will come back.”
Master the decisive aspects
Gahleitner points out that issues such as off-spec processing can have many origins. These can be in the polymer itself, the color, the part design, the processing. “It can be many things. You don’t always need to fully understand all details of all aspects, but you absolutely must master the decisive aspects.” He says that Borealis researchers always take a systematic approach that goes beyond a simple design of experiments around common parameters. “We strive to work from a hypothesis, for instance articulating what parameter will change what phenomenon.”
This approach requires a knowledge base that according to Gahleitner has been developed in part through collaborative DPI projects. To Rein Borggreve, DPI’s Executive Advisor, this underscores precisely the value of DPI: “We offer the opportunity to remain up-to-date and develop new knowledge in relevant areas of polymer technology such as polymer chemistry, crystallisation behaviour, thermodynamics, analytical methods and many more. In general, these are typically pre-competitive subjects that allow for multi-company collaboration in joint projects with universities. And by joining forces you can conduct more research for less money, increasing the return on investment.”
Topics with future relevance
Borggreve, who has worked the greater part of his career in research management at the former DSM, has seen the polymer industry focusing its research increasingly on short-term, application oriented topics. “This has been accompanied by a decline in the internally available expertise on more fundamental topics, which is crucial to their ability to compete, and survive in the long term. So that knowledge now must be obtained from somewhere else. DPI is, of course, a very good vehicle for that.” Gahleitner: “The strength of DPI is that you have a broad range of people with a wide range of competencies in a diverse range of projects. These projects might focus on interesting aspects of your own current R&D, but also on topics that you expect to become relevant in the future. And by and large, the scientific level of the work is high to very high.”
A characteristic of the DPI approach to such pre-competitive research is that multiple industry partners cooperate in one project. Borggreve: “If you can bundle similar questions from multiple companies, you definitely have more clout, you can formulate more projects, and you can have more topics studied.” As an example, Gahleitner mentions an earlier project on multi-stage co-polymerisation with a Ziegler Natta catalyst. “Six of seven years ago this project yielded a lot of interesting results. Those were not necessarily the things we set out to find, which is characteristic of this kind of research. The point is, these days we are coming back to that project because in one of our development lines we are simply hitting a solid wall of production problems. The data we obtained earlier might be helpful to solve our current issue.”
The strength of DPI is that you have a broad range of people with a wide range of competencies in a diverse range of projects. These projects might focus on interesting aspects of your own current R&D, but also on topics that you expect to become relevant in the future. And by and large, the scientific level of the work is high to very high.
Markus Gahleitner, Borealis
Meetings and coffee breaks
Gahleitner remarks that participating in DPI does require some effort: “You must find people who, on top of their often very urgent obligations, can devote part of their attention to such less acute research topics. Because otherwise, the return on the money you’re investing in DPI will be limited.” And there’s the aspect of companies competing in the market but cooperating in a DPI project. To this, Gahleitner takes a realistic approach: “Of course there’s some caution about what to share with your competitors. But at the same time it’s very interesting to be in touch with each other – during meetings, but also during coffee breaks. There you often hear how others think of your products.
Borggreve adds that DPI offers a non-competitive environment where the companies are in the lead. “This is one of the strengths of DPI; we only take a facilitating role. It’s up to industry to define a joint project that suits all participants. Whether you use plastics and are looking for specific properties, or you produce polymers and are looking for new catalysts, these are all topics we can put on the agenda. Through our extensive network, you will meet peers from other companies to initiate a joint project. We usually see three, four, sometimes five companies joining in one project. With DPI, there’s something in it for everyone.”
Who’s talking
Markus Gahleitner is Senior Group Expert Polypropylene at DPI partner company Borealis. He provides scientific support to Borealis’ research and development efforts, manages all aspects of intellectual property, and is responsible for internal training of Borealis researchers. He is also involved in cooperative projects with various universities and represents Borealis in DPI. Gahleitner has authored over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications and holds many patents.
Rein Borggreve has been Executive Advisor to DPI since 2022. Prior to that, he held various positions in research management at the former DSM which was a long-term DPI industrial partner (now replaced by Envalior). For almost twenty years, Borggreve served as Vice President of Research & Technology at DSM Engineering Plastics, where he retired in 2020.
This interview is the first in a series of five, exploring the added value of pre-competitive research and the role of the DPI community in advancing polymer innovation.
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