Noury­on announces 2019 Ima­gine Chem­istry finalists

Ima­gine Chem­istry was launched to tackle chem­istry-related chal­lenges and uncov­er new ways to cre­ate value for cus­tom­ers. The 2019 edi­tion gen­er­ated more than 160 innov­at­ive ideas from star­tups, scale-ups, uni­ver­sity spin-outs, and oth­er poten­tial part­ners. Sus­tain­able bio-based sur­fact­ants (in part­ner­ship with Unilever)

• CarbEx­plore Research (The Netherlands)
• Fraunhofer IGB (Ger­many)
• Sironix Renew­ables (USA)
• The Uni­ver­sity of Shef­field + Entom­ics (GB)

Per­form­ance-boost­ing nanoparticles 

• RISE (Sweden)

Sens­ing in demand­ing chem­ic­al environments

• Aren­al Pro­cess Con­trol Solu­tions (The Netherlands)
• Flu­ence Ana­lyt­ics (USA)
• Ingu Solu­tions (Canada)

Label-free chemistries

• Intel­li­gent Flu­ids (Ger­many)

Push­ing the fron­ti­ers of chem­ic­al innovation

• Altum Tech­no­lo­gies (Fin­land)
• Cam­bridge Car­bon Cap­ture (UK)
• Ionomr (Canada)
• Kan­sas State Uni­ver­sity (USA)

The final­ists will par­ti­cip­ate in an intens­ive three-day event in May at the company’s RD&I cen­ter at Deventer, the Neth­er­lands, where they will work with Noury­on experts and busi­ness lead­ers to fur­ther devel­op their ideas into a joint value case. Win­ners are gran­ted awards ran­ging from joint devel­op­ment and research agree­ments to ded­ic­ated sup­port from Ima­gine Chem­istry part­ners. Uni­lever, for example, a key cus­tom­er of Noury­on and a part­ner in the ​“Sus­tain­able bio-based sur­fact­ants” chal­lenge, offers the oppor­tun­ity for win­ners to col­lab­or­ate with its R&D teams and test facil­it­ies to move their ideas to the next phase of devel­op­ment. ​“Ima­gine Chem­istry is part of our focus on part­ner­ships to drive growth and help us devel­op the essen­tial solu­tions our cus­tom­ers need,” said AB Ghosh, Man­aging Dir­ect­or Sur­face Chem­istry at Noury­on. ​“I’m impressed by the qual­ity of sub­mis­sions and the ideas of this year’s final­ists are highly inter­est­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to see who we’ll be work­ing with to help drive sus­tain­able growth in the future.” In three years Ima­gine Chem­istry has gen­er­ated more than 500 solu­tions, and sev­er­al are enter­ing the com­mer­cial phase. These include Semi­ot­ic Labs, which uses machine learn­ing and pro­pri­et­ary sensors to pre­dict when and why equip­ment fails; and Invert Robot­ics, which provides safer, non-destruct­ive inspec­tion ser­vices using state-of-the-art mobile climb­ing robots. Source: Noury­on, Media release, 19. April 2019