by Clifford K. Schoff, Schoff Associates
As articles in this issue of CoatingsTech show, product and process innovations are critical to gaining and keeping business in the highly competitive coatings industry. Advances in sustainability are becoming equally important. Unfortunately, there can be barriers to developing innovative and sustainable products and processes and to implementing them.
What are some of the barriers? Sarah Eckersley’s article in this issue leads with a famous Louis Pasteur quote, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Barriers to innovation include corporate and individual minds that are not prepared. For example, management may not have a clear idea of the next new product or the next sustainability step. It may not have the courage to stick with research that is moving slowly or to provide the resources necessary for its completion. Paint companies and suppliers have systems for identifying promising new technologies with test-drilling, gate keepers, periodic checks on progress, etc. There is a lot of pressure to show continual progress. However, creativity does not necessarily follow timetables. I recall two cases from the days when there was greater flexibility. In the first project, even though a consultant said that the chemistry would never work, managers and researchers refused to give up. After considerable effort, they produced a blockbuster technology. In another case, a manager told his team to drop a project because of lack of results. Instead, the chemists kept going, fit in experiments along with their work on other projects, worked late, kept results to themselves, and eventually presented their boss with an excellent product that ultimately was highly profitable. Could that happen now?
Not all barriers are management or people related.
A major drag on the rate of product innovation
is the lack of adequate test methods in many key areas.
Sometimes, management is unwilling to seek help from all available resources, which may include customers and suppliers as well as support groups within the organization. I understand that sharing needs and problems with outsiders can have pitfalls. However, I know from experience that a patient, pro-active customer, especially one willing to become part of the team, can save a great idea that is not working. Most organizations are paranoid about telling suppliers anything, but these producers usually have experience using their materials to solve development problems. The same thing is true of sharing such difficulties with internal groups such as Analytical, Physical, Application, or Engineering. Too many people in research are not willing to share sufficient information to enable support groups to provide effective help. Good communication at all levels is critical to the development of superior technology.
Innovation is best developed in-house, but it does not have to be that way. I have seen examples where licensing of technology led to improved products and acquiring of business that would not have happened otherwise. It also can lead to patenting of innovations in the technology by the licensee and cross-licensing that is beneficial to both parties. Ignoring or refusing opportunities to license innovations by other companies can lead to loss of market share due to not having a competitive product. Such decisions may occur because of misreading of customer willingness to pay the price for the new coating, cost of licensing royalties, or the “not invented here” syndrome (a classic lack of a prepared mind).
Not all barriers are management or people related. A major drag on the rate of product innovation is the lack of adequate test methods in many key areas. We need tests that are precise, accurate, and that truly predict performance, but we do not have them. For example, it is very difficult to develop a coating with improved adhesion without a precise, accurate adhesion test. The most precise method is the cross-hatch and tape technique (ASTM D3359), but that does not give reliable absolute numbers and is only good for ranking a series of coatings. We rarely know why adhesion is good or bad, which adhesion mechanism is operating, or the composition of the thin coating layer next to the substrate. We believe that corrosion resistance depends on wet adhesion, but we do not have a test for that. We have several hardness tests, but they are based on different principles and users rarely have any idea how the results relate to end use properties. The latter is true for other physical and mechanical tests as well. We need better techniques to measure and predict rheological properties and then need to relate them to relevant application methods. ASTM Committee D01 on Paint and Related Coatings, Materials and Applications continues to work on improving existing paint test methods and developing new ones, but it receives less and less support from paint producers and suppliers and almost none from users.
CoatingsTech | Vol. 14, No. 6 | June, 2017