Chemistry Innovation Network Is Set Up In U.K.

To boost the competitiveness of the U.K.'s chemistry-using industries in the global marketplace, the British government has established an organization known as the Chemistry Innovation Knowledge Transfer Network. Chemistry Innovation, as it is also called, aims to improve innovation performance in the country's chemistry-using industries by turning cutting-edge research and technical expertise into new technologies and products. The network brings together businesses, universities, and research and technology organizations.

Launched in London in March, Chemistry Innovation will provide U.K. industry with a one-stop shop for advice on the latest developments in chemistry innovation, according to Barry Gardiner, a minister in the government's Department of Trade & Industry (DTI), which is investing around $9 million in the network over three years.

The new network is one of 19 knowledge-transfer networks that have so far been set up by DTI with funding of more than $75 million over the next three years. The networks, which are part of the department's technology program, cover areas as diverse as aerospace and defense, bioprocesses, chemistry innovation, electronics, food processing, pollution management, materials, health technologies, photonics, and sensors.

"The U.K. government has been wrestling for many years with the problem of creating organizations that promote industrial innovation by linking it to academic work," comments Chris Adams, board member of Impact Faraday, one of the organizations that has been brought into Chemistry Innovation. "The knowledge-transfer network initiative is the first top-down approach in modern times. It attempts to identify strategies for all important sectors of U.K. industry and is endorsed by government and industry associations."

Adams observes that previous initiatives all involved competitive, bottom-up exercises. "Coverage of important sectors of British industry was a matter of chance," he says. "If Chemistry Innovation and other knowledge- transfer networks in the country can bring together into useful cooperation all the organizations fostering innovation within their respective sectors, they may have a chance of meeting their ambitious targets."

Chemistry Innovation Chief Executive Officer Carol Boyer-Spooner predicts that 50% of the products people will need in the next 10 to 15 years have yet to be invented. "Innovation is the message of industry in the 21st century," she says. "Chemistry Innovation's vision is to stimulate and support product and process innovation in the chemistry-using industries so as to deliver additional gross domestic product to the U.K."

The funding of the network is managed by the company Chemistry Ltd., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.K's Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). "Chemistry Ltd. is the contractual partner of DTI," explains RSC Science & Technology Director Rodney P. Townsend. "The company allocates DTI funding through service contracts with partner organizations involved with Chemistry Innovation."

Organizations incorporated into and now managed by Chemistry Innovation include three of 24 so-called Faraday partnerships that were set up in the U.K. between 1998 and 2003 to promote interaction between industry in the U.K. and the country's science, engineering, and technology base. The partnerships are alliances of R&D organizations, universities, professional bodies, trade associations, and industries. They receive core funding from DTI and U.K. research councils.

One of the three partnerships, Impact Faraday, aims to help companies develop and exploit innovative colloid and formulation technology. It offers a consultancy service for bringing new products and processes to market faster and has research and training programs.

Impact Faraday also has a commercial Web-based distance learning program, www.FaradayLearning.com. It consists of six "e-Guides" on colloids, colloid formulations, and related topics. "There are 24 modules within the e-Guides and, we estimate, about 2,000 pages of online learning content," says Bill Heslop, training business manager at Impact Faraday. "The program was funded by DTI and has been successful in engaging companies such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Individuals can access the guides by purchasing a single-user license. Site licenses are available for companies and organizations."

Another Faraday partnership that migrated to Chemistry Innovation earlier this year is known as Insight Faraday. This partnership "aims to improve R&D productivity in U.K. businesses, particularly in the chemistry-using sectors, predominantly through the effective use of high-throughput technologies," Chemistry Innovation Projects Director Steve Fletcher says.

Among Insight Faraday's achievements are a U.K. road map for high-throughput technologies and the development of an audit service in laboratory productivity and operational effectiveness. The service enables companies to optimize the performance of their current operations and helps them to justify future investment. It also established a number of collaborative projects involving industry and universities and generated a research portfolio worth about $43 million.

One of the collaborative research projects addresses the analysis of biological cells that are used for drug discovery, clinical diagnosis, bioanalysis, and toxicology. "This project will develop a microfluidic chip device and instrument platform capable of bioassaying viable mammalian cells," Fletcher notes. "The consortia members, which include GlaxoSmithKline and LGC Ltd., provide skills for optimized chip and instrumentation design and routes to commercial manufacture, all focused on suitability for real-world performance for applications in the fields of drug discovery and contract bioanalysis."

The third Faraday partnership that moved to Chemistry Innovation this year is Crystal Faraday, the U.K.'s innovation center for green chemical technology. Founded in 2001, and incorporated as a not-for-profit company in 2003, the partnership has three hub partners: RSC, the Chemical Industries Association, and the Institution of Chemical Engineers. In 2004, it published a green technology road map that recommends directions the U.K. chemical industry should take to adopt sustainable technology and develop greener products for its customers. The road map is currently being updated, according to Boyer-Spooner.

"Sustainability is probably the biggest issue facing the chemicals and chemical-using industries, and Crystal has built a good base from which to make it happen," comments David Bott, a senior adviser to DTI and vice chairman of Crystal's Strategy & Implementation Board.

Neville Hargreaves, Chemistry Innovation's commercial director, explains that the partnership's specific mission is to promote and support sustainable innovations that use green chemical technology and to help companies discover markets for green products.

Its activities, which are now managed by Chemistry Innovation, include sponsorship of research carried out at British universities in partnership with industry. At the University of Durham, for example, Graham Sandford, Richard D. Chambers, and coworkers are carrying out a three-year green chemistry Crystal Faraday research project funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), one of the eight U.K. research councils. The Durham group uses standard metal workshop techniques to fabricate multichannel continuous-flow reactor devices for gas/liquid reactions, such as the direct fluorination of 1,3-ketoesters and 1,3-diketones.

"We have developed a multichannel system that allows for up to 30 reactions to be carried out in parallel on one device," Sandford explains. "One of these devices can synthesize 100 g of product overnight. If five such reactors were placed in a standard fume cupboard, they could do a better job than a much larger pilot plant, and they use just a fraction of the resources."

The Durham microreactors can be employed for potentially hazardous processes that use gaseous reagents under pressure. "Levels of control and safety can be achieved with the microreactors that are not possible using conventional reactors," Sandford says.

The Impact, Insight, and Crystal Faraday partnerships also have attracted grants known as the Industrial Cooperative Awards in Science & Engineering (CASE). The awards are funded by EPSRC.

Crystal, for example, has allocated these grants to students to carry out green chemical technology research projects. The students are jointly supervised by academic and industrial partners. The latter provide a minimum monetary contribution of at least one-third of the EPSRC grant toward the costs of the project.

One of the Industrial CASE projects, now sponsored by Chemistry Innovation, is run by chemical engineering professor Andrew G. Livingston at Imperial College, London, in collaboration with AstraZeneca. It focuses on membrane technology.

"The project is investigating how ionic liquids can be combined with membrane technology to effect C-C coupling reactions, which are of key interest to pharma synthesis routes," Livingston tells C&EN. "Recovering products from ionic liquids involves using volatile solvents in extraction processes. We use organic solvent nanofiltration to separate the product from the ionic liquid and catalyst at the end of the reactions. We find that this is a facile way of recovering products from ionic liquids without using much volatile solvent."

Chemistry Innovation has identified five key innovation platforms for the initial phase of its activities. Three of the platforms−colloid/particle technology, high-throughput technology, and sustainable technology−build on the activities of the Impact, Insight, and Crystal Faraday partnerships, respectively.

In addition, Chemistry Innovation has pooled the competencies of the three Faraday partnerships across three functions: technical, projects, and commercial, Chemistry Innovation's platform portfolio manager, John Whittall, tells C&EN. The technical function will provide support for companies involved in the network. The second function will be devoted to specific innovation projects, and the commercial function will provide services and other partner connections for industry, he says.

The other two Chemistry Innovation platforms are sustainable manufacturing and analytical science and measurement. The sustainable manufacturing platform includes a project supported with almost $2 million of funding from Northern Way, a partnership of three regional development agencies in the northeast of England.

One of the partners of this project is Britest Ltd., a consortium of industrial and academic members that was set up to deliver competitive benefits to chemical and pharmaceutical companies. The company uses a set of proprietary methodologies, known as Britest tools, to design the best process and manufacturing strategies for its industrial members, which include AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson Matthey, and Rhodia.

Britest's chairman is Brian Murphy. He is also managing director of Robinson Brothers, a small family-owned company in West Bromwich, England, that produces specialty organic chemicals. Murphy points to several examples of the success of the Britest approach. In one, Robinson Brothers was able to cut the stages in a multistage process by 40% and reduce waste and energy consumption by 50%, compared with the original process.

"Robinson Brothers is good at innovation networking, but with so much going on, what we are missing could be critical," Murphy says. "Innovation is a risky business. The risk can be mitigated by sharing it with members of a consortium and by knowledge networking."

Other partners of Chemistry Innovation's sustainable manufacturing project are the Centre for Process Innovation, which was established in Redcar, England, by one of the Northern Way regional development agencies to stimulate and drive innovation within the process industry, and the Process Industries Centre for Manufacturing Excellence (PICME), which is also based in Redcar. PICME is partly funded by DTI and was set up to assist companies manufacturing chemicals, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and rubber to improve their competitiveness and efficiency.

Chemistry Innovation's sustainable manufacturing project will enable British chemical companies to benefit from a single point of access to knowledge, solutions, and tools to improve their manufacturing productivity and efficiency, according to Maria Meek, who is responsible for Chemistry Innovation's public relations and communications.

The network, together with RSC, is also taking a leading role in SusChem, the European Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry. SusChem is supported by the European Union's 6th Research Framework Programme and was initiated jointly by the European Chemical Industry Council and the European Association for Bioindustries in 2004. It aims to help focus European research in chemistry, chemical engineering, and industrial biotechnology on the development of a sustainable European chemical industry.

Meanwhile, the Chemistry Innovation platform on analytical science and measurement is still at the planning stage. A task force of RSC's Analytical Division has a contract with a consultancy firm to prepare a proposal for the platform, Townsend notes.

More platforms will be introduced as the network develops. But it is early days yet. "Chemistry Innovation is currently establishing its working methods, including establishing how to work with partner centers of expertise and excellence," says Julian Morris, professor of process control at the University of Newcastle, in England.

Morris is also technical coordinator of the Centre for Process Analytics & Control Technologies (CPACT), one of the organizations that aims to get involved with Chemistry Innovation. The center carries out collaborative R&D programs with industry and trains industrialists and academics in process analytics and control technologies. It is based at the University of Strathclyde, in Scotland, and includes science and engineering departments at other universities in Britain.

CPACT is a one-stop shop for companies seeking advice and research on all aspects of responsive processing technologies, including analytical chemistry, analytical measurements, signal processing, statistical modeling, chemometrics, and process control and optimization, Morris notes. "Process analysis and control have been identified by EPSRC and industry as strategic areas that underpin the survival of the U.K. process sector," he says.

"The U.K. chemical industry's competitiveness is at risk because of global price pressures, low market growth, and delocalization of customer industries," Morris continues. "Several issues must be addressed to ensure sustainable, globally competitive, and profitable U.K. process industries."

These industries must, and are, taking responsibility for their future, but they will need the support of organizations like Chemistry Innovation, he concludes.