In this May 2001 Formulators Forum column, Ken Klein, formerly of Cosmetech Labs, acknowledges (even back then) being bombarded by marketing claims for the latest and greatest, making him skeptical of new products. Here, he proposes a course of action.
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(Readers: Note this article is taken from our May 2001 archives).
Practically every day of the week, in fact several times a day, we are bombarded by literature from raw material suppliers telling us about their latest and greatest new raw material. This is just the product we have been waiting for! The claims that are being made for these materials are at least as varied and imaginative (often more so) as the chemistry. I don’t know about you, but I can say without any reservation that I’m getting to the point of information overload, which is making me rather skeptical about new materials.
(Readers: Note this article is taken from our May 2001 archives).
Practically every day of the week, in fact several times a day, we are bombarded by literature from raw material suppliers telling us about their latest and greatest new raw material. This is just the product we have been waiting for! The claims that are being made for these materials are at least as varied and imaginative (often more so) as the chemistry. I don’t know about you, but I can say without any reservation that I’m getting to the point of information overload, which is making me rather skeptical about new materials.
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Over the past several months I have been visited by salespeople who have introduced me to their new materials and claim substantiation literature. When they left, I had more than 2 inches of new data to go through. This is an impossible task if your real job is to work at the bench developing products. Of course, you may be lucky enough to work for a company that has one (or more) people who are designated as technology assessors. Such people are hired specifically to sort through these massive amounts of paper and separate the meaningful and useful information from the insignificant, unexciting, or just plain rubbish/marketing hype. Unfortunately, most of us do not have the luxury of having others make sense out of the information for us.
However, if we overlook new raw material information, we are destined to be unimaginative formulators, mired in the past! We may miss the chemical that could solve a stability problem with which we have been struggling for months. So, we are presented with a predicament: if we spend our time adequately studying new literature on raw materials, then we won’t have sufficient time to really do our jobs. Yet if we don’t do this, we will fall behind and cannot carry out our job of product development adequately. What are we to do?
While I don’t have any panacea, I can suggest a course of action that will permit you to learn about relevant new materials and glean meaningful information that will help in your product development duties.
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