JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #138 - January/February 2021 - 14

BUSlNESS strategy

Taking your innovation to market:

commercialising new products in the composites sector

Peter George,
Senior Consultant
Future Materials Group

uccessfully commercialising new products
and
technologies
means avoiding a host of potential pitfalls, as explained
below.
Push back from
the existing supply chain
A critical point to consider
is that your new product will
either directly substitute an
existing product or offer a
novel path through the supply chain that in each case
renders either a product or a
process redundant.
This will be strongly resisted,
particularly if there is a significant irreversible investment to be defended such
as machinery or production
lines, where the incumbent
player may need to discount
or spend extra on defensive
marketing to defend their
business and survive. A considered solution that pushes

The commercialisation of innovative technology continues to drive the
expansion of the composites market in new and existing applications,
with growth rates forecast to remain at around 7% CAGR for the period 2020-2025. In this feature article, FMG discusses some of the key
challenges to new product and technology commercialisation in the
composites and advanced materials sectors. They also expand on the
benefits that an external advisory can bring to the table, challenging
a company's strategy and helping to de-risk the launch.

through or works around all
barriers and opposition is
needed - remember that it
may not just be the obvious
direct competitor that your
arrival threatens but someone linked further down the
supply chain.
Not knowing where
to enter the supply chain
It may sound odd to cite
product positioning in the
supply chain as a challenge
in the commercialization
process, but what is really
referred to here is the position of the value of the novel
change you are suggesting.
Is it your product that is
cheaper or the use of it in a
novel way downstream that
is of value? Are you happy
to supply a novel material
or process to others, or do
you choose to keep full
control and step into the
perhaps unfamiliar world of
your customer in composite
intermediates or component
manufacturing? Added value
and increased margins from

the novelty may encourage
you to diversify downstream
but it is important to recognize whether such a move
will expose capability or
capacity gaps in your organization that could trip you up.
A broader revolution required
Your new product may
not be a simple drop-in
substitution. Perhaps your
innovation will require designers to combine materials
in a different way or take a
different engineering route
to the final design. This does
not have to be an instant
transition - early adopters
may exploit your innovation
in more valuable niche applications with bigger volume
applications coming on
board later once economies
of scale and experience make
it more viable.
Making sure you own
the new technology
Fundamental to promoting
a new product will be
introducing its details and

jec composites magazine / N°138 January - February 2021

advantages to customers or
potential partners.
Before doing this, you need
to ensure that the idea is
yours, not copied and not
copiable by securing the
intellectual property (IP)
around it.
Take good advice here to
help decide if you should
patent the technology, not
just the product.
Patenting discipline will
require you to prove that the
idea is novel and not already
published, that it is a step
forward and is feasible and
write the patent to cover
the widest possible scope of
possibilities.
However, it may be that you
need to keep your smart idea
secret by not publishing a
patent; if the idea is going
to be easily copied after first
sale by reverse engineering,
then patenting is the main
defence. And of course, in
the long term, the value of
any creative business is easier to prove if it holds useful
patents.

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #138 - January/February 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #138 - January/February 2021