Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University, Specially Appointed Professor at Hiroshima University
Dr. Yoshiki Chujo
"Won't you enjoy benefits by effective use of contract research?"
When private companies, especially laboratories of materials manufacturers, attempt to develop new applications using their own materials and technology, they have to do preliminary evaluations whether the characteristics of those materials meet the requirements of the needs of the applications. Meanwhile, they are often exposed to requests, called "claim processing" to do research into improving materials already used by their customers. That is, their customers often request to raise the heat resistance of a material somewhat or to make it so that a material will dissolve in a given solvent, etc. And, if they cannot respond to these requests, customers typically replace their materials with ones from other manufacturers.
Even without bringing up such examples, in order to advance material development and quality modification research in a laboratory, you need the "human resources," "apparatuses," "knowledge," and "raw materials" for the experiments, testing, and analyses involved in such development. In particular, you have to cover the high costs associated with these "human resources," that is, "personnel costs" and "apparatuses," that is, "capital investment." Naturally, it is worth it to incur these costs when there is sufficient demand and future needs to justify them because it goes without saying that they will pay for themselves. Problems arise though when you want to make preliminary examinations where you just give things a little try.
Utilizing "contract research" is an effective means for conducting preliminary examinations for research at such companies. Once the prospect has been established that outsourced preliminary examinations have gone well, companies can commence full-scale development in their own laboratories. Counting this advantage of contract research may bring you benefits as a result, therefore, I encourage you to consider the possibility of contract research.