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New product development is a crucial task for modern corporations. Facing an increasingly competitive and dynamic market, the ability to continuously identify consumer needs and create products that meet such needs is essential to business success. As a result, researchers from fields such as management, marketing, industrial design and engineering have devoted their attention to new product development issues. The aim of this article, which is based on the feature appearing in the June 2006 issue of AIChE Journal (1), is to describe the emergence of chemical product engineering within the chemical engineering discipline and the challenges it poses to education and R&D research.
Since many of the chemical products of today and tomorrow have little in common with those of 20 years ago, the portfolio of skills and technical knowledge required by chemical engineers has been changing rapidly. The consequent update in the scientific sphere of chemical engineering is conveyed in terms of three major trends:
1. broadening of the body of knowledge associated with the discipline to include concepts such as biotechnology
2. adopting a multifaceted approach to products and processes
3. recognizing emerging chemical product engineering as a well-established academic and R&D field. Each of these trends has direct implications for teaching and research (Figure 1).
The establishment of chemical product engineering as an autonomous branch of chemical engineering has been emerging for the last decade. It is fueled largely by process companies' need for more systematic development approaches (2, 3, 4) (Figure 2).
Defining chemical products
The term chemical product is used in this article to encompass the wide range of goods, both tangible and intangible, that chemical process companies sell, beyond commodity chemicals. Table 1 illustrates the different categories of chemical products, which seem to have little in common, based on their appearance or performance. Yet. similarities between them exist in areas of development and manufacturing. The term chemical product engineering should then designate the framework of knowledge, approaches, methodologies and tools employed to analyze, develop and produce the whole range of chemical products.
A crucial feature of chemical products is the way that customers perceive them. Customers generally do not judge a chemical product's value based on its technical specifications, but rather, on functionality and performance attributes, such as...