15 Mar 2004
ECMSA at LESI Paris
Scenarios for the Chemical Industry: 2010 to 2015
The European Chemical Marketing and Strategy Association (ECMSA) is running two industry-critical workshops at this year’s Licensing Executives Society International (LESI) meeting in Paris, which runs from 29 – 31 March 2004.
In two consecutive Chemical Industry Scenarios Workshops being held on the 31 March, ECMSA will lead discussion and analysis of the implications for the European chemicals industry of the ECMSA Scenarios 2010 and the newly-released CEFIC Scenarios 2015, which provide a series of possible industry futures.
One workshop will look at implications of the need for greater focus on innovation The second on the same afternoon will investigate the customer aspects of these chemicals and plastics industry scenarios.
Discussion at the workshops will be led by ECMSA's facilitators:
Phil Allen, CEO, MarketAbility and ECMSA Council Member (Overall Industry Scenarios, Innovation and Customer Value Management)
Ada Neilson, BP Amoco (Specific Implications for Licensing)
Phil Barnett, Director, PriceWaterhouseCoopers' Intellectual Assets
Management Practice (Specific Implications for Intellectual Asset Management)
The innovation workshop will use Scenarios 2010 and 2015 as the foundation for hands-on, interactive sessions for "What if...?" strategies for licensing in and licensing out.
Attendees will work in small group exercises facilitated by the instructors using the techniques of the strategic management module of the Fundamentals of Intellectual Asset Management developed by LES USA-Canada and now licensed to LESI. This will combine the scenarios of 2010/2015 with case studies and engage the attendees actively.
The Customer workshop will be based on a presentation of MarketAbility's Customer Value Management Benchmarking Study of the Chemicals and Plastics Industry (originally conducted for Scenarios 2010). This has identified an overall poor performance across the sector in terms of customer orientation and customer value management. "The picture is not very pretty" says Phil Allen. "The average performance amongst the leading chemicals and plastics producers is well below par and even the top-ten performers identified in our report fall a long way short of best practice." He explains, "We are convinced that there is a correlation between the performance of companies on Customer Value Management and their overall business results and this appears to be borne out by the results of the study."
The workshop will aim to identify key common issues and provide some
solutions.
Reader enquiries
ECMSA
P.O. Box 85612
NL-2508 CH Den Haag
Netherlands
Notes for editors
ECMSA is an organisation that brings together the decision makers from within the chemical industry. As a not-for-profit organisation ECMSA takes a lead in helping to shape and define the future and direction of the industry. Originally established in 1962 as the European Chemical Market Research Association, the organisation assumed its current role in 2000.
LES International is an association of 30 National and Regional societies, each composed of individual members who are engaged in the profession of licensing and other aspects of transferring or profiting from intellectual property. The LES family is business-oriented for the most part, and its over 10,000 individual members include management representatives from companies both large, medium and small, scientists, engineers, academicians, governmental officials, lawyers, patent and trademark attorneys and consultants.
ECMSA’s original Scenarios 2010 project was conducted at the turn of the
millennium to look at the drivers for possible futures for the chemicals and
plastics industries in 2010. ECMSA worked on this project with the
consultants Arthur D Little, Roland Berger, Boston Consulting, WEFA and
enlisted the help of its sister organisation in the US the Commercial
Development and Marketing Association (CDMA). Key drivers of value growth in chemicals were identified as Customers, Innovation and People.
ECMSA, working with its consultant partners in this project has developed
further various aspects of the Scenarios 2010 project and focused
particularly on Innovation and Customers in later work.
CEFIC Scenarios 2015 work has just been completed and the results are available now from CEFIC. CEFIC’s ‘CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 2015’ study suggests that the industry faces a bleak future unless urgent action is taken now. The industry council has proposed the creation of a chemical advisory group for Europe (CAGE) involving industry stakeholders to look at future industry competitiveness. This seminar will delve further into the study results and look in more detail at its conclusions.
Editorial enquiries
Chris Brooks
ECMSA
Greg Farrett
EMG