Releasing knowledge resources

We actively manage and endorse knowledge transfer to release our company’s full creative potential. One of the tools we use to tap into this potential is our Linking Knowledge approach. It has resulted in a network organization which facilitates both knowledge transfer and team spirit troughout the company. This makes the expertise of individual specialists accessible for all to benefit the organization as a whole. Frequently, an idea that has led to a solution in one instance can provide creative impetus for many more. Extra encouragement for this sort of process comes in the form of our Not Invented Here award, for transfer and improvement of existing ideas across business unit boundaries. The award is granted to all involved: idea originators, idea appliers, and knowledge transfer facilitators.

We enhance the customer and market focus of this approach even further with another organizational innovation that we call Areas of Competence. These competence clusters give all units across the Group access to chemical technologies that are a specialty of particular business areas. Our TEGOSPHERE® product for the cosmetics industry embodies what we aim to attain in this way. TEGOSPHERE® is a polymer that microencapsulates sensitive cosmetic ingredients, reliably protecting them from being broken down by UV light and oxygen but releasing them at just the right instant to have optimum effect. The product’s development is the outcome of successful teamwork across several units: The market research, the initial idea, application engineering and implementation were the work of the Consumer Specialties Business Unit, the encapsulation technology is from Coatings & Additives, and our Inorganic Materials Business Unit contributed the pyrogenic silicic acid AEROSIL® for use as a plasticizer. Making this innovation happen thus required the interplay of several different capabilities, a process that we systematically endorse with our Areas of Competence.

Transferring knowledge and ideas is also the aim of our project houses, where teams of 20 to 30 highly specialized scientists are freed of their day-to-day workload to concentrate solely on developing innovative technology platforms. For a maximum three-year period, they work closely with business units and outside partners such as universities, research institutes and customers. The end goal of each project is to commercialize the outcomes in a business unit or internal start-up. Our current project houses are dedicated to two research areas: Functional Films & Surfaces, and Process Intensification.