Callaway Golf turned to DuPont to develop a golf ball geared to women. DuPont already had a foothold in the market, because it developed the Surlyn resin that many manufacturers use for the cover of their golf balls.

John Chen, a senior technology associate at DuPont Packaging and Industrial Polymers, developed a resin that forms a layer inside Callaway's HX Pearl golf ball. The layer, which is between the cover and the core, helps the ball travel farther with greater control, two traits Callaway thought would appeal to women golfers.

Architects and car designers want to incorporate more glass in their designs, such as sunroofs that extend the entire length of the car's roof, because consumers like the look. But, with traditional glass, more glass means more heat and higher air conditioning costs.

DuPont researchers stepped in, designing a polymer layer that fits between the two panes of glass in a window. The SentryGlas Plus interlayer, which is used in architectural glass, and the Butacite interlayer, used in auto glass, deflects some of the infrared radiation that can heat up a car or a building. The interlayer also keeps the glass from shattering. Next for DuPont: windows that control how much light gets in.

Display screens for TV, computer monitors and cell phones are a $70 billion-a-year market. DuPont researchers are working on display screens that are sharper and give off less heat and use less electricity than current models.

DuPont is working on displays made of tiny carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes, which are invisible to the naked eye, emit electrons that excite a layer of phosphor beneath the screen's surface. The phosphor emits light from the front of the screen, eliminating the need for backlighting.

At the same time, DuPont is working on a different display screen technology using organic light-emitting diodes, which are complex chemical molecules that give off light.

DuPont researchers are working to combine soybeans with the health benefits of Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3, which is derived primarily from fish oil, is thought to reduce heart disease and improve brain function. The idea is to produce soybean oil that could be used as a food ingredient with the benefits of Omega-3 without the fishy smell. To accomplish this, DuPont researchers genetically modified the soybean so it converts alpha-linolenic acid and linoleic acid into the two fatty acids responsible for Omega-3's health benefits.

Wilmington-based DuPont Co. has expanded far beyond its origins in 1802 as a maker of gunpowder. Today, it is a diverse company with businesses ranging from corn` seeds to developing the next generation of flat television screens.

$6.23 billion in sales from automotive coatings; titanium dioxide, a white pigment used in the packaging and coatings industries; and Artistri inks and printing systems for digital printing on textiles.

$3.51 billion in sales from materials for the electronics and communications industries, such as components for semiconductors and printed circuit boards. It is developing displays for TVs, computers and cell phones that use organic light-emitting diodes.

$6.75 billion in sales from man-made materials geared to the automotive, packaging, construction and electronics industries, including high-tech glass for cars and buildings.

$5.23 billion in sales from products such as Tyvek building wrap and Kevlar fiber, which is used in bulletproof vests. DuPont Virkon S disinfectant is being used to help fight the spread of the H5N1 avian flu. Corian countertops are another of the platform's products.

When Steven Freilich ripped open a box of his children's breakfast cereal, it wasn't for the prize inside. For Freilich, the box itself was the prize.

The Harvard-trained organic chemist worked as a global business manager in DuPont Co.'s titanium technologies business in the late 1990s. Part of his job involved figuring out ways to sell more titanium dioxide to the paper industry and develop related products. Titanium dioxide is a pigment used, among other things, for coating cereal boxes.

Freilich, 50, has moved on from cereal boxes to become director of Materials Science and Engineering at DuPont's Experimental Station, the storied 150-acre research complex on the Brandywine north of Wilmington that is the epicenter of the company's research and development.

Gone are the days when legions of DuPont scientists in the company's Central Research and Development department could spend careers in blue-sky research that might never result in a product. The mantra at DuPont now is that research produces things customers will buy.

"To be effective, you start with the marketplace," said Kwaku Temeng, a DuPont marketer who works with Central Research scientists to help them focus on commercial targets. "You find a problem and then bring the science to bear on it."

With increased global competition, companies across the board are less willing to roll the dice on research that doesn't pay off in new products, said Donald Rosenfield, director of the Leaders for Manufacturing program at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The number of new products DuPont brought to market jumped 46 percent in 2005, to 1,133. A third of the company's annual sales last year came from products less than five years old. By 2010, DuPont wants 35 percent of sales to come from products less than four years old.

"It's so much easier when you know that someone beside yourself and your research team wants the solution you're trying to create," said Timothy Gierke, research manager in industrial biotechnology at Central Research.

In 2005, DuPont spent $1.33 billion -- about 5 percent of its $26.6 billion in sales -- on all research and development. That's more than competitors 3M ($1.2 billion), Dow Chemical ($1.1 billion) and Monsanto ($588 million).

The question for DuPont employees and investors is whether the company has mastered a new approach to research that will enable it to perform in an increasingly global economy.

DuPont faces growing pressure to develop new products to replace the millions it receives each year from a revenue-splitting arrangement with drug maker Merck & Co. for a pair of blockbuster drugs the companies developed jointly.

DuPont received about $751 million last year from sales of Cozaar and Hyzaar, about a third of the company's $2.05 billion in 2005 net income. The income from the drugs will largely dry up in 2010, when their patents expire.

Charles O. Holliday Jr., the company's chairman and chief executive officer, in a speech at an international meeting on biotechnology last year, took note of the central role innovation has played in DuPont's history.

Each of the company's many changes, from gunpowder manufacturer to chemical company to integrated science company, were driven by technology, Holliday said.

"In the 20th century, our science was focused on transforming natural processes and natural materials," he said. "In the 21st century, our emphasis will be on using nature's processes to build sustainable systems and create sustainable products to address global needs."

DuPont's billion-dollar R&D commitment hasn't done much to lift the price of the company's shares, which are trading about 8 percent lower than they were five years ago. The shares are up slightly this year.

"This company has as good an ability as anybody to put dollars and scientists onto projects," said Dan Ortwerth, who covers the company for Edward Jones.

Ortwerth believes DuPont will come out with new products to offset the impending lost income, pointing to its electronics and safety and protection businesses as major revenue sources.

Charles Pedersen, who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his discovery of the crown ether molecule, worked there. DuPont inventions from Neoprene, the world's first synthetic rubber, to Kevlar, a super-strong fiber used in bulletproof vests, were developed there.

DuPont always employed scientists who focused mainly on products and improving manufacturing processes. But in 1927, the company launched its Central Research department, under the direction of Charles M.A. Stine, to conduct pure scientific research.

Stine's mission was to "investigate the underlying science behind all of the products that DuPont made," said John K. Smith, a history professor at Lehigh University and co-author of the book "Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902 to 1980."

By 1968, Central Research was so well regarded it was profiled in Business Week magazine. The article captured the academic air of Central Research back then, calling it "part 'think tank' and part commercial laboratory" and "not too different from a chemistry-physics-biology department on a top university campus."

"We sit back at the end of each quarter century and decide whether to pat ourselves on the back," Theodore Cairns, then the assistant director at Central Research, told Business Week. "I don't think it's realistic to decide [Central Research's] merits on a much shorter time span."

The Central Research labs at DuPont's Experimental Station serve as what Uma Chowdhry, vice president for Central Research, describes as an incubator for ideas. Researchers work on longer-range projects -- those with a time frame of four years or more -- than their counterparts in other units.

When Chowdhry started at DuPont in 1977 as a research scientist, the atmosphere at Central Research, which has a work force of 900, reminded her of MIT, where she earned a doctorate in materials science.

"I could work on whatever I felt like working on," she said. "The belief was, you bring in good scientists and allow them, for the first few years anyway, to have the freedom to explore."

"People don't have the time, or the freedom, to do a lot of exploration, like they did before," Chowdhry said. "They are very focused on getting a product out faster."

Chowdhry, 58, said fast-paced global competition brought about the changes, starting in the mid-1990s, when the emphasis was on improving DuPont's manufacturing processes. By the late '90s, under Holliday's leadership, the focus had shifted to research leading to new products, she said.

When she began her career at DuPont, Chowdhry said, it would have been unthinkable that marketing people would talk to Central Research scientists.

These days, Central Research has an eight-person marketing team, including Temeng, 47, a strategic market development manager with a chemical engineering doctorate from Georgia Tech and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, who relay to scientists what they're hearing from DuPont customers.

DuPont is betting heavily on biotechnology and electronics. The company also is investing in a variety of products with commercial appeal, such as windows that transmit less heat, a resin that makes golf balls fly farther and a soybean rich in healthy Omega-3 fatty acids.

In biotech, the company already has a deal with Mohawk Industries for a line of SmartStrand carpets made of Sorona, which DuPont touts as softer, stretchier and more-stain resistant than traditional oil-based fibers.

Later this year DuPont will open a $100 million aerobic fermentation plant in Loudon, Tenn., to produce from corn the main chemical from which Sorona is made. DuPont expects to sell $3 billion worth of industrial biotech products by 2012, the company has said.

When Holliday, DuPont's chairman and chief executive officer, met with Wall Street analysts in November, he highlighted biotech's importance to DuPont by wearing a suit spun from Sorona.

The new products DuPont is banking on for the future will spring from the Experimental Station, where about 2,000 projects are under way at any given time.

But despite DuPont's push for new products, R&D spending is down since 1990 both in constant dollars and after accounting for inflation. In 1990, DuPont spent $1.43 billion on R&D, which was 6.2 percent of sales excluding sales from the Conoco oil company, which DuPont owned at the time. That compares with the $1.33 billion DuPont spent in 2005.

After accounting for inflation, DuPont would have had to spend more than $2.1 billion last year just to keep pace with what $1.43 billion could buy in 1990.

Employment at the Experimental Station has dropped over the years as DuPont sold its pharmaceuticals and Invista textiles businesses. Two thousand people work at the Experimental Station today, down from 3,000 in 1993 and from 4,500 in 1985.

Most analysts believe a new wave of discovery could come just in time to rescue DuPont. Of the 16 analysts who cover the company, 12 rate it a buy, according to a tally by Bloomberg, a financial news service.

Ortwerth, of Edward Jones, credits DuPont with taking "a much more disciplined approach" in recent years to its research. Instead of following a high-risk strategy of swinging for the fences trying to find the next home run product like Nylon or Kevlar, DuPont researchers are concentrating their effort on producing what Ortwerth calls "singles and doubles" that will lead to new products and boost revenue in the long term.

In a note to clients in March, HSBC analyst Hassan Ahmed commented favorably on DuPont's development pipeline of new bio-based products, which he called "a combination of proven technologies on the cusp of commercialization."

But large corporate R&D departments, like DuPont's Central Research, are no longer the dominant engines of innovation they once were, said Ken Smith, professor of business strategy at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. The high cost of research has forced even the biggest companies to change the way they do business.

Instead of doing R&D entirely in-house, making a huge financial investment in projects that may not pan out, large companies increasingly acquire new products and technology from smaller, more nimble companies and academia, he said.

In doing so, they are following a model pioneered in the drug industry, where big pharmaceutical companies buy smaller biotechnology companies or cut licensing deals with them to acquire promising drugs in development.

Last month, for example, AstraZeneca, which employs nearly 5,000 people in Delaware, said it would pay $1.07 billion to acquire Cambridge Antibody Technology Group, a British biotech.

Over the past 25 years, "the basic research role has reverted to the federal government and the universities," said Joseph Seneca, professor at Rutgers University's Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.

Another concern is scientific innovation often comes from companies outside the United States. Today, American companies send R&D work to facilities in other countries and establish partnerships with foreign businesses, said Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and the author of "Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology."

"It used to be that most of these technologies were developed in the U.S. by the leading American companies," Chesbrough said. "Now it's a much more global market for innovation."

Funding could suffer if the government needs to trim its budget, and politics could influence which research the government chooses to finance, Seneca said.

He points to embryonic stem cell research, where the Bush administration limited funding to projects using existing cell lines. Some conservatives and religious groups applauded the move while scientists said it was too restrictive.

Seneca sees another drawback to companies forcing their researchers to work with profit as a main goal. If they're so focused on new products, they could easily miss other important discoveries.

"The nature of basic research is very serendipitous," Seneca said. "You want to let those Bell Lab scientists think about the universe and work down from there."

If they follow the market exclusively, they may pass up the chance to develop products with commercial appeal that customers haven't yet dreamed of, he said.

He points to such consumer favorites as video games and Apple's ubiquitous iPod as products that companies developed even before there was an established market.

Jules Duga, a senior research scientist at Battelle, a contract research organization based in Columbus, Ohio, who studies industrial R&D spending, sees another drawback to the obsession with the marketplace.

It's not only applied research at DuPont's Central Research, however. Researchers there still find time to work on what Gierke, a research manager in industrial biotechnology, calls "bootleg projects."

"Discovery sometimes happens in ways you can't predict," said Gierke, who joined DuPont in 1974. "If you only do what you're assigned to do, you're going to miss out on some great opportunities."

For continued funding they have to pass muster from an internal review board consisting of Chowdhry, the vice president for Central Research; Thomas Connelly Jr., DuPont's chief science and technology officer; and the technical directors of each of the company's five business platforms, showing how the project will result in a commercial product.

"What has not changed is the quality of the talent, the curiosity about science, the commitment to excellence," she said. "What has changed is the discipline with which we start the research based on market insight, market foresight and customer needs."

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