Preface
Under Papers and Reports, this section is divided into four fields:
You will also find published letters and articles under “Articles and Letters on the Economy”.
Design of Economies
The Development of Innovative Products and Processes for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises
Presentation to Trakya University, Edirne, Turkey
S F Bush
The roles of the enterprise, university and government: Introduction
The University Centre for Manufacture at Manchester and its precursor worked in collaboration with SMEs and government agencies.
Results have been reviewed for a ten year period from 1996 to 2005.
The Techno-economic Model (TEM) has been developed over the same period to aid decision-making about which projects to support.
The TEM has predictive power and shows the importance of the “Stoichiometric Principle”.
The Stoichiometric Principle
As in the air-fuel ratio for internal combustion engines, this determines the optimum ratios of resources for:
- Product R&D and Process R&D
- Capital investment and total R&D
- Marketing and Production
A Techno-Economic Model Applied to the Development of New Products and Improved Processes
Paper to the 7th World Congress of Chemical Engineering, Glasgow, 1st-4th July 2005
Published by the Institution of Chemical Engineers, vol 83, No A6, pp 646-654
S F Bush
Abstract
This paper reports both practical and theoretical results from some 82 projects conducted with 70 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) over the last 8 years. The companies are found in the plastics, chemicals, food, metal fabrication and electrical components sectors of manufacturing industry. The objective of the projects has been to develop new science-based products and/or processes, or improvements to these – occasionally all of these things.
The initial choice of a project and its subsequent management have been subject to a specific techno-economic assessment procedure evolved by the Centre for Manufacture’s partnership with NEPPCO Ltd – a company specialising in research and development for the process industries. As described in the paper, this procedure now deploys a techno-economic model (TEM) which links quantitatively the inputs and outputs of: research and design, investment and production, sales and marketing, over any given time period. The TEM allows market share and return on investment trajectories to be generated for an innovative change under various assumptions about the competition and the company management’s own characteristics. The paper demonstrates the importance of what may be termed the stoichiometric principle of innovation, i.e. optimum financial performance requires the resources devoted to product design, process efficiency, investment in plant and in selling, to be kept in strict proportion to each other.