Guest
Lecturer Conor Wilkinson 28/02/2020
Lubrizol is a market-driven global company that focuses on optimising quality, performance and value of products within consumer, industrial and transportation markets. Through developing ‘complex speciality chemicals’ (The Lubrizol Corporation, 2020) from raw materials, the 92-year-old company has become a ‘leader at combining market insights with chemistry’ (The Lubrizol Corporation, 2020) that is now paving the way for sustainability within this sector. Guest Lecturer Conor Wilkinson, a platform scientist with The Lubrizol Corporation (Wilkinson, 2020) enlightened me to advancements in product-development and material sustainability.
Lubrizol is a market-driven global company that focuses on optimising quality, performance and value of products within consumer, industrial and transportation markets. Through developing ‘complex speciality chemicals’ (The Lubrizol Corporation, 2020) from raw materials, the 92-year-old company has become a ‘leader at combining market insights with chemistry’ (The Lubrizol Corporation, 2020) that is now paving the way for sustainability within this sector. Guest Lecturer Conor Wilkinson, a platform scientist with The Lubrizol Corporation (Wilkinson, 2020) enlightened me to advancements in product-development and material sustainability.
Figure 1: Map depicting Lubrizol’s Headquarters’ Locations
Market
mapping and Voice-of-the-Customer studies are integral to the development of new projects as they allow for insight into marketing demands and their hierarchy. This allows for Lubrizol to easily determine the value of solutions that the company can provide to
consumers. As a result, a Market-Action-Plan is developed; finding solutions
that the customers are willing to pay for if necessary. This allows a project
profile to commence.
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Figure 2: Infographic depicting the process of
Voice-of-the-Customer Study
A project profile is
split into the following:
Figure 3: Flow chart depicting project profile
The business and technical profiles as shown
above are needed to establish the existing market size, saturation and
benchmark to allow products in development to be competitive in price and
quality. Both profiles need to be favourable to allow proposed product to be a
commercial success.
With environmental issues being a pressing global concern, it's
vital that companies rise to the occasion and create innovative solutions to
reduce non-biodegradable waste and global emissions.
During the guest lecture it was illustrated
that although plastic has sustainability issues, it provides the best solutions
to many problems, therefore making the material hard to replace. As
Connor Wilkinson explained and displayed that many “solutions” that are presently
available are not implemented properly due to the lack of infrastructure
currently in place and are not practical for today’s society, an example of
this being polyethylene coated “biodegradable” cups. The solution lies towards
creating biobased products that are biodegradable, which is a goal that
Lubrizol is striving to achieve. The manufacturing of biobased, biodegradable
products is a credible endeavour that I believe that every company should be
working towards.
The lecture resonated with me as I gained practical
knowledge and a far more informed understanding of the implications of the
impact consumers have from development to disposal of product that has led to a
newfound appreciation of product development.
All
figures unless stated are created by the author.
APA
Harvard References
· The
Lubrizol Corporation. (2020). About, [LinkedIn], Retrieved from
·
Wilkinson,
C. (2020). Conor Wilkinson Profile Page, [LinkedIn], Retrieved from
· Lubrizol.
(2020). Featured Locations, Retrieved from
· Lubrizol.
(2017). Sustainability Report, Retrieved from
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