The Situation
Stranded in the Sahara Desert
The fluoropolymer segment of a large specialty materials company had a mandate to grow. Their portfolio of performance polymers, elastomers, and coatings was market-leading but mature — and their innovation pipeline was “like the Sahara Desert.” The client desperately needed to identify potential applications that could both meet their near-term revenue targets and focus their long-term R&D efforts.
The Approach
Searching High and Low
We went out into the world to look for a new set of opportunities for our client, scouring the world for unsolved problems that our client’s capabilities could address. We leveraged data science techniques to look at every source of academic, scientific, and technical information you can imagine and aggregated everything we came across into a database of dozens of ideas.
Look at it from a different angle.
Most materials companies are far removed from the ultimate customer or user of their product. If there’s a problem downstream, they don’t always hear about it — and if they don’t hear about it, they can’t do anything to fix it. Newry’s novel scouting and searching methods are specifically designed to give clients a better line of sight into market needs so that they can find new and exciting challenges to work on.
The Outcome
Closing the Deal
If you had one of the early models of a wearable fitness tracker, you might have experienced a fault wristband or even skin irritation. Our technique spotted this problem before these products were ubiquitous, and we confirmed that our client’s technology was well-suited to solve it. Shortly after we connected the client to several potential customers in the Bay Area, they received a large order for their material, making this opportunity a home run for them.