Partner with us
Innovation thrives when it’s driven by a diverse mix of ideas. This is why we always look to collaborate and share insight with our industry partners. This collaborative approach helps us to:
- Deliver more effective and sustainable solutions for customers
- Speed up time to market
- Ensure product and process differentiation
- Reduce R&D costs
We want to be the partner of choice for our customers, potential customers and technology developers. Together, we can build new supply chains, evaluate disruptive technology and bring solutions to market faster. Working collaboratively with customers has delivered innovations that meet very specific needs, as well as creating solutions with applications across a range of markets.
Smart partnering
Sustainable innovation comes from working together. We seek and develop commercial relationships with organisations by forming Smart Partnerships, sharing knowledge and harnessing specialist expertise to benefit our customers. This includes developing novel technologies and bringing them to market faster, using our R&D and commercial networks to speed up progress.
Innovating with academia
Open Innovation
Great ideas can come from virtually anywhere, so we have developed a global collaboration framework to help these ideas reach their potential and get to market. This includes strong working relationships with leading universities, academics and students, helping ensure the technologies and solutions we develop are able to reach the right markets. It’s a way to share world-class knowledge, expertise, facilities and equipment, including specialist knowledge of the markets we serve, formulations and product applications.
Collaborations with academia, university start-ups and technology enterprises mean our customers benefit from new approaches and ingredients to help them work smarter, with consumers benefiting from this constant innovation pipeline.
Are you an academic or student with a great idea?
We always want to hear new ideas and smart thinking and are open to collaborations on novel ingredients that offer performance benefits to our customers, or new processing technologies to help us manufacture products in more efficient and sustainable ways. To help us meet our ambitious Commitment to be Climate, Land and People Positive by 2030, we would like to further our knowledge in technical areas including:
- Refining
- Biotechnology
- Reducing carbon cost
- Reducing energy consumption
- Reducing water usage
- Reducing manufacturing footprint
- Reducing emissions
Our markets
Case study: The University of Cambridge, NiTech Solutions and Croda
Working with technology designers NiTech Solutions and The University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, we created a new process to manufacture more sustainable surfactants. Traditionally, industrial production of surfactants often occurs in large batch reactors, which have low energy efficiency and a long reaction time.
Following research, a novel process using NiTech’s patented continuous oscillating baffle reactor technology was developed and trialled at one of our manufacturing sites. This innovative, sustainable solution to manufacture surfactants enables the move from batch to continuous reactions, mixing with high accuracy and reducing plant footprint. As we continue to use and develop this technology, more sustainability benefits are anticipated.