Innovation in the chemical and material industries is responsible for numerous technological advances that people are enjoying today in the areas of food, clothing, medicine, transportation, construction, and many more. In the past, before the emergence of today’s startup ecosystem, large industrial conglomerates were responsible for the bulk of innovation, with large R&D departments that produced patent after patent.
However, changes in the prevailing economic theory have resulted in large corporations scaling back on R&D investment, with academia and startup companies picking up the slack when it comes to innovation. Researchers and startups would take on most of the risk in developing a new product or process, proving that it is industrially viable, and scaling it up, eventually attracting further investment to grow the business or being acquired by a larger corporation – what’s known as an exit strategy.
Today, there is a vast network of incubators and accelerators that help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to market successfully, which is one of the biggest challenges of the innovation process, as shown by the huge failure rate of startups. There is a very wide gap between a good idea on paper and an innovative product on the market – and this is what Process Industries Consultants seeks to help businesses address.
Established by Joel Shertok, PhD, in 2014, Process Industries Consultants provides its clients in the chemical, material, and biotech industries with process insight, technical expertise, and innovative commercialization strategies, which form a strong foundation for the businesses’ growth. Dr. Shertok has 50 years of experience in chemical engineering and scientific research, having developed novel products over multiple technologies, such as specialty chemicals (polymers, polymerization coatings), carbon fiber composites, biotech-based nutritionals, membrane filtration, ion exchange and carbon based separations and formulation development. These have resulted in several patents under his name.
Dr. Shertok shares that his interest in chemistry was sparked at a young age when he read a book at his high school library. He pursued his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from The Cooper Union, before studying for a PhD in the same field at Princeton University. In the 1970s, he began working for Union Carbide, one of the largest chemical companies in the US. Over the years, Dr. Shertok worked for corporations of all sizes, with roles mostly centering on developing new products and solving problems in various manufacturing facilities.
Eventually, Dr. Shertok decided to move into the consulting space by founding Process Industries Consultants, seeking to share with clients the knowledge and experience he accumulated for almost five decades. He typically works with startups and medium-sized companies with annual revenues of $50 million to $150 million. As a consultant, he has led innovative product development teams to full commercialization, as well as driven multimillion-dollar growth, both organically via internal development and inorganically through mergers & acquisitions.
According to Dr. Shertok, to successfully bring a product to market, it should begin with identifying a market and developing a product that meets that market’s needs – not the other way around.
“The worst type of call that I can get from a client is from either a startup or an established company and they tell us: ‘We have a product. Can you find us customers?,’ he says. “That is a major issue and I tell them that they’re too late. Product development should begin with finding a customer and then figuring out the product that they need. In my 50 years in the industry, I’ve found out that the stage has changed, but the play is always the same. Technology changes and advances, but there are fundamental principles to business success that do not change.”
As part of his mission to help entrepreneurs take their businesses in the chemical and material science fields to the next stage of growth, Dr. Shertok wrote The Art of Scale-Up: The Successful Chemical Practitioner’s Guide to Creating a Profitable Process. This book deals with how to take innovations from small-scale lab processes to large-scale commercial production. He says that doing so is not as simple as acquiring more factory space and purchasing additional manufacturing equipment. For example, he shares one experience at a previous chemical operation earlier in his career. The process worked excellently in the laboratory, but, once it was scaled up industrially, the process emitted a horrible byproduct that they had never seen before. It turned out that the process had always emitted the byproduct, but it had done so in small, undetectable amounts in the lab – leading to significant problems once it was done on a large scale, as the byproduct would rapidly build up.
“I used ‘art’ instead of ‘science’ in the title of my book because scale-up is like making wine,” Dr. Shertok says. “It’s part science, but involves a lot of art. There are established rules, but every scale-up has a different gimmick behind it that businesses have to understand going in.”
Media contact:
Name: Joel Shertok
Email: [email protected]
