Reflection on collaboration
by Ross Pilling, retiring Chairman and Managing Director of BASF Australia and New Zealand, and Board Member of the CRC for Polymers
Partnering for success
Finding solutions together – this recipe for success laces the history of BASF as a common thread. It shows up in collaboration with scientists and other innovative companies, as well as in interdisciplinary collaborations within BASF.
Throughout its history, BASF has fostered research collaborations which have resulted in outstanding milestones. The synthesis of ammonia is a prime example that the bundling of interdisciplinary internal and external expertise leads to success: Fritz Haber, a university chemist developed the process at laboratory scale and Carl Bosch developed the industrial-scale high pressure synthesis at BASF. Both scientists received Nobel Prizes for their work on the synthetic production of ammonia.
Today, research cooperations are a fundamental source of innovation for BASF – they are of strategic value and systematically developed. This is why we maintain close relations with many universities and research institutes around the world and participate in nationally and internationally sponsored projects.
One such example is our five-year agreement with the Cooperative Research Centre for Polymers (CRCP), where we developed a new range of advanced polymers to control soil wettability, water availability and nutrient delivery.
With more than five million hectares – or thirty percent – of Australia’s cropping land being susceptible to water repellence, soil science is a widely-underestimated success factor for farmers. And it is partnerships like these that lead to innovative, cost-effective and sustainable solutions.
One of the greatest values of the CRCP has been its ability to bring together a world-class interdisciplinary team of material researchers, biologists and agricultural scientists from BASF with experts in physical chemistry, soil and plant science, and biophysics from leading Australian universities and government laboratories.
Fundamental research is a high-risk activity, and the CRCP cooperation has allowed us to offset some of this risk by sharing it with our partners. The CRCP’s well-structured mechanism for steering and managing projects, combined with BASF’s deep and long experience in innovation and research management, have ensured that we the followed paths that lead to high-value outcomes and made some important discoveries along the way. For instance, we were able to develop a new diagnostic soil test that allows farmers to predict the most beneficial chemistry for a specific environment.
The team’s clarity of the technical goals and critical milestones from the very beginning, along with an understanding of how these goals would create value for both BASF and Australia, have been essential to the success.
Now, BASF has licensed these new soil wetting technologies co-developed with the CRCP and we are excited by the opportunity to help Australian farmers improve water efficiencies and increase yields.
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