A materials company was starting to have a problem. Their flagship product was beginning to see competition from newer materials that had better aesthetics. Research determined that a contaminant in the product was responsible, and that it would be a four-year process to identify the culprit, reformulate around it, and then complete the scale-up, regulatory, and long-term aging tests required to commercialize it. The business was not happy with the lengthy and expensive plan but approved it because they had to have a solution. This was the start of the project.
Cici, a brilliant scientist in the group, and I started work to solve the problem. We quickly realized that the contaminant was not present in any of our raw materials, nor was it present in our product itself until after it saw high temperature processing. This prompted the idea that we might not have to completely redesign the product. If we could stabilize the product from generating the impurity, we could move the project much faster. We quickly identified an effective stabilizer that could fit right into the manufacturing process and almost completely stop formation of the undesired compound. With dramatic progress in hand, we then realized that we could use simple physics to completely mask the remaining contaminant. To make the picture even better, the two additives that we needed to solve the problem were cheap, already used in our plant, and had complete regulatory clearances so we could avoid the very long-term testing that would be required for a redesigned material.
The result? The product was defined, tested, and taken to industrial scale not in four years, but in just three months. The product went on to be wildly successful and, obviously, the business was very pleased. The initial four-year plan for the project was technically viable, and if followed, it likely would have resulted is a successful resolution of the problem. The important learning here is that even when you have identified the problem to be solved and a viable path to attack it, you should step back to determine if there is a better way to define the problem. Is there another way to state it that will open new and perhaps better avenues for its solution? By looking at the problem from all sides and considering multiple approaches to solve it, you will come to better and more balanced solutions.
