Product Development & Materials Innovation

When this comes up

• A development programme is slipping, and the open questions are materials questions.
• What works at bench or pilot scale is not reproducing in production.
• The concept needs a material that does not exist off the shelf, or a formulation that has to be built.
• A performance target is being pursued without agreement on whether it is physically reachable.
• The programme needs a senior technical view without hiring a full in-house materials group.

Where the work concentrates

Formulation and structure–property relationships

The through-line of this practice is the relationship between formulation, structure, processing, morphology, properties and performance — across all classes of materials. That chain is where development programmes usually stall, because a change made at one end produces an unexplained result at the other.

Scale-up

Bench-to-pilot-to-production transitions fail for reasons that are predictable in advance: shear and thermal history differ, residence-time distributions differ, mixing quality differs, and a formulation tuned to a laboratory process can be intolerant of the production one. Identifying which of those a given formulation is sensitive to, before the capital is committed, is usually the highest-value point in the programme.

Materials innovation

Where an off-the-shelf material will not reach the target, the route may be a blend, a hybrid, a nanocomposite, a modified surface or a reformulated system. Direct research experience across organic–inorganic hybrids, nanocomposites, biomaterials, magnetic materials and glass–polymer systems informs whether a proposed route is promising or a known dead end.

Intellectual property

Where development produces something protectable, support is available for patent applications and for positioning the work so that it can be protected — drawing on direct experience as a named inventor and on prior-art and patentability work. See Expert Witness & Litigation Support.

How a programme is supported

• Technology and market opportunity assessment — is this route worth taking, and what does the literature and patent landscape already say about it.
• Ideation and concept shaping — turning a performance target into candidate material and process routes.
• Design, prototyping and testing — specified through university and industry laboratory partners.
• Production transition — identifying the process sensitivities that will decide whether it scales.
• Cross-functional technical project management — forming and running the team, including identifying university research groups and national laboratories that can be brought in cost-effectively.

Process areas covered

• Extrusion
• Injection moulding
• Compounding & formulation
• Coatings & films
• Adhesives
• Polymer reaction engineering
• Rheology
• Materials processing
• Materials testing
• Properties of materials