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Link to Our February 28 Webcast on Driving Innovation in the Chemical Industry

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Tony Grzesik and I hosted a webcast focused on driving innovation in the chemical industry, and focused in particular on what Microsoft brings to the table to help our chemical and agriculture customers get better results from their innovation process.

If you want to check it out, click here.

I opened up the webcast talking about the types of innovation chemical companies do (pure R&D, application, services, business models), and talked about a December, 2007 article that AMR Research published which did a nice job surveying the chemical industry to understand the type of innovation they do and understand their biggest challenges.  If you have a subscription to AMR, it's a good read.

Tony then took over and talked about a study that Microsoft conducted together with PRTM around innovation in all manufacturing industries, including chemicals.  I'm not sure if we posted it yet, so if you are interested in taking a look at the published whitepaper, send me an email and I will get it over to you.

Tony then dove into where Microsoft and our partners are delivering on capabilities and solutions for R&D.  We spent time on core Microsoft platform capabilities, as we had a mixed audience of R&D on the business side, IT that specifically serves R&D, and core IT enterprise architecture.  I'm quite sure the core enterprise architects were bored with the capabilities talk (they know it like the back of the hand mostly), but Tony and I have found that even in our most sophisticated Microsoft customers, the business users in R&D aren't always using the tools and technologies they have available to their full advantage.  Having that basic capabilities discussion has always been valuable to an R&D audience.

We also ventured into more sophisticated areas like Portfolio Management using our Portfolio Server product, and talked about the overall innovation process including ideation and phase gate processes and how a couple of our partners (DataLan and Formark, for example) are implementing solutions on top of SharePoint.

Anyway, take a look and give me feedback.  Good or bad, ways to improve.  Would love to hear all of it.

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