Key Points
• Asia Pacific will be largest absorbent products
market by 2011.
• Eastern Europe and Latin America have shown the highest
growth rates since 2001.
• Ethical consumerism and concern for the
environment could cause a backlash against disposability.
• “Globalisation”
is in conflict with “Sustainability” especially in the textile industry where
part-processed yarns and fabrics are shipped between continents several times to
save cost.
• K-C's mission is to “innovate, develop and source advantaged
nonwoven solutions” and be supplier of the year every year.
• An
EDANA-sponsored study concluded that medical disposables are a relatively
unattractive industry with low margins, high investments and huge competition.
• ExxonMobil report the availability of plenty of oil for the foreseeable
future – political instabilities excepted.
• SCA will soon be able to make
more money by burning wood pulp to generate electricity than by converting it
into paper.
Global Hygiene Trends
Irina Barbalova, Head of Disposable Paper
Products Market Research and Euromonitor International (UK) listed the
key trends:
• People are getting richer (especially in middle/old
age)
• They lead more hectic lives
• They are walking 10% faster than
10 years ago.
• They are marrying later or not at all
• They want to
be fitter and healthier for longer.
• They want better products to make
life easier, but…
• A backlash is now occurring, and compromises with being
“Green” are being sought.
Ethical consumerism and an inclination to support
“green” products wherever they appear is higher on the agenda than last year. In
fact buying eco-friendly goods has become fashionable and “niche” hygiene
products are moving into the mainstream.
Euromonitor $-based statistical headlines were as
follows:
• Eastern Europe (16%) and Latin America (11%) account
for over a third of global hygiene growth since 2001. (Asia Pacific grew 5% in
the same period)
• Based on 2006 sales, USA , China , Japan , UK and France
are the world's top 5 largest markets.
• Based on 2005-2006 growth, China ,
USA , Russia , Mexico and Brazil are the world's top 5 most dynamic
markets.
• For personal care products globally, most growth between 2005 and
2006 came from Inco (10.5% growth), followed by diapers (7%), Femcare (6%),
Wipes (4.8%) and Cotton Wool (3.2%).
• Household wipes grew less than 1%
between 2005 and 2006. They are losing their novelty value and a return to
traditional cleaning methods appears to be occurring.
• Within personal care
wipes, facial cleansing wipes were now a billion dollar market growing at 10%
pa, twice the size of the general purpose wipes which were growing at 9% pa and
a third of the size of baby wipes now growing at 8% pa.
• Femcare wipes grew
fastest (21%) but were a tiny market in comparison.
• Deodorant wipes,
similarly small, recorded 5% growth.
• Baby wipes showed renewed growth
(2005-2006) due to new introductions from P&G and KC.
• Wipes shares
globally in 2006 were 64% baby, 20% facial, 11% general purpose, 3% deodorant,
and 2% femcare.
• Household wipes now use improved detergents, better
fabrics, more convenient device-like formats and more disinfecting power.
•
Personal wipes have more application formats (hair wipes, foot wipes, male
wipes, bald head wipes), and increasing novelty in packaging, scents and
lotions.
• Natural ingredients, organic cotton, flushability and
biodegradability claims are increasingly seen in facial wipes, and new gadgets
for their use are being tested.
• “Silk” softness is a new feature in
femcare, and here increasingly convenient and discreet packaging is
appearing.
• “Green” disposable diapers are attracting more interest because
washables remain unacceptable. Boy/girl, night/day and new ultra-premium diapers
are emerging.
The Outlook to 2011:
• Asia Pacific will become the largest absorbent
hygiene market - $18 billion sales growing at 6% per annum. China 's birth rate
will increase due to the abandonment of the 1 child policy and this market alone
will add $3bn by 2011.
• North America ($15 billion) and Western Europe ($12
billion) will show less than 1% pa growth.
• Latin America ($11 billion)
will grow at 7.5% pa. Eastern Europe ($5.3 billion) will grow at 9.5% pa.
However, increasingly ethical consumerism and concern
for the environment in an increasingly homogenous world could cause a backlash
against disposables.
Energy Outlook
Didier Lutsen replaced Christophe Lacroix of
ExxonMobil ( Belgium ) to review their projections for energy costs
through to 2030.
World population would reach 8 billion mainly due to
growth in non-OECD countries. Global GDP would grow at 2.8% per annum to reach
$75 trillion and the energy demand would grow at 1.6% per year to reach 320
Million Barrels per Day of Oil Equivalent. This latter figure was a saving of
140 MBDOE over that predicted in 2005 assuming 2005 rates of energy use would
continue. The savings came from energy-use plateauing in OECD countries, the
growth coming mainly from expansions of the non-OECD economies. Most of this
growth would be based on coal, gas and other sources, growth in liquids (crude
plus oil-sands, biofuels etc) slowing. “Other” or the non-fossil energy sources
would grow to 60 MBDOE by 2030 mainly due to growth in use of biomass, nuclear
and hydro/geothermal sources. Wind and solar power would amount to no more than
2.6 MBDOE.
Natural gas demand would grow at 0.5% per annum in North
America to reach 90 Billion Cubic Feet per Day by 2030, only 60 BCFD being
available locally. Imports of Liquefied Natural Gas would make up the bulk of
the shortfall, with a little coming in by pipe. In Europe, growth would be at
1.5% per year to reach 70 BCFD by 2030, 40 of this being piped in from Russia ,
and 20 being imported as LNG. Asia Pacific gas consumption would increase at
3.7% pa to 90 BCFD by 2030, 50 BCFD being produced locally, and the majority of
the rest being LNG from the Middle East and Indonesia .
The consequence of this continuing dependence of fossil
fuels would mean that global CO 2 emissions would continue to rise by 1.6% per
year, mainly due to non-OECD expansions. Options for reducing atmospheric CO 2
levels included a switch to nuclear power, to advanced motor transport requiring
much less fuel, to carbon capture and sequestration in depleted oil and gas
fields, and breakthroughs yet to be made. Hydrogen for transportation remains
energy intensive and complex, but the in-car generation of hydrogen using
gasoline looks more promising and would reduce emissions by 45%. Carbon capture
is expensive but pumping it into depleted oil and gas fields to push out the
remaining fossil fuel looks practical.
Asked if political instability could limit availability
of oil and gas, Mr Lutsen said it could and this had not been factored into
ExxonMobils projections. Venezuela and Russia were reluctant to allow
multinationals to exploit their reserves, and these states were spending their
oil revenues on non-oil projects, and thus not reinvesting sufficiently.
Nevertheless he felt there would be plenty of oil for the foreseeable future.
Reserves estimates had been increased due to new extraction technology becoming
viable at the higher prices. Carbon capture is expensive but pumping captured CO
2 into depleted oil and gas fields to push out the remaining fossil fuel now
looks practical. The costs of this “last drop” extraction would of course be
very high.
EU Energy Outlook
Per Arfvidsson, Senior VP and CPO for SCA
Hygiene ( Sweden ) listed the challenges facing EU energy policy
as:
• High oil price leading to costly gas and electricity.
• Tight
supply – any disturbances cause a price spike.
• Russian oil and gas supply
security.
• Middle East volatility.
• Competition from China and India
for energy
• Only 10 years of gas left in EU. Imports are essential.
The energy outlook is now heavily influenced by the
Emission Trading System which collapsed in 2006, CO 2 emissions being valued at
zero €/tonne earlier this year. By 2008, when ETS Phase II commences, this
should be corrected and the 2005 price of ~€20/tonne CO 2 should be restored.
The Phase II ETS will lead to a convergence of all power, gas and coal markets,
and prices for all energy sources will increase as a consequence.
The EU has a strong political commitment to convert
itself into a sustainable society and in addition to the ETS, subsidies based on
Renewable Energy Certificates will be available to encourage electricity
production from renewable resources. When the value of electricity and the REC's
are combined, their level at March 2007 meant that burning spruce woodpulp in
SCA's combined heat and power stations made economic sense. In other words,
rather than make paper, SCA could now use the wood to generate electricity more
profitably - providing the wood could be sourced within about 300 km of the
power station.
Asked if incineration of waste would be a useful energy
source, Mr Arfvidsson and Mr Lutsen thought it would be and it already plays a
big part in SCA's energy generation – more so than wind-power.
Innovation at KC
Robert Stargel, VP of Kimberly-Clark's Global
Nonwovens Division (USA) defined innovation as “People implementing
ideas that create new value”.
His examples of K-C's “Business Enabling Innovations”
were spunbond for diapers, stretchable laminates for training pants, Coform for
wipes, and SMS for medical barrier fabrics.
• Spunbond had been pioneered when KC installed Lurgi
lines, which they debugged and perfected prior to licensing to
Reifenhauser.
• Meltblown had been acquired from Exxon and similarly
perfected.
• K-C's combination of the two in SMS had enabled new product
categories to emerge.
• “Product enabling innovations” were listed as
•
fastening loops (code-named PUB),
• Stretch-ears for diapers (NBL),
•
Breathable cloth-like barriers (SFL)
• Thin absorbent cores (TABBI)
K-C has always placed high priority on intellectual
property and is a prolific patenter, with 351 granted patents in nonwovens
between 2002 and 2006, c.f. 145 from P&G, 49 from PGI and 42 from
Freudenberg. Their innovation process has involved vertical integration from
vision and ideas through polymer to converted product, and they develop the
technological expertise to make this possible.
For the future their mission would be “to innovate,
develop and source advantaged nonwoven solutions”, and they target being
“Supplier of the Year” every year. To achieve this they would continue to use
past successful strategies but with more emphasis on consumer insights, the
internet, sales of IP, partnerships, open innovation and modelling. For consumer
insights they used the ?whatif! innovation company. Partnerships with
Pegas and various universities (including Caltech, MIT, Michigan , Oklahoma , NC
State) were mentioned. Open Innovation was exemplified by the new “Sun Signals”
indicator to show when children had had enough sun, and the “Cool Alert” aid to
potty training.
In conclusion, Mr Stargel observed that while consumer
insights drive short-term innovations, consumers don't know what they will need
in the longer term, and so K-C's job is to try to anticipate these needs. He
foresaw the talent pool shifting to India and China , hence the need for special
initiatives to get US kids more interested in science, in addition to moves in
Asia to harness the innovation potential there. They had launched an Innovation
Center in Korea , a Hub and Spoke network in India and were partnering with
Donghua University in China .
Innovation in
Elastomerics
Richard Brennan, VP Personal Care for Kraton
Polymers (USA) introduced Kraton as the world's leading producer of
styrenic block copolymers, a billion dollar company with 850 employees. They
obtain styrene, isoprene and budadiene from crude oil and make 600 different
products. The Kraton D range comprises unhydrogenated SBC's, while the Kraton G
range is hydrogenated. They provide personal care consumers with fibres and
glues which offer stretch, soft-touch grip, adhesion, strength and durability;
and hence comfort and fit in the hygienic disposables containing them.
A new class of very high melt-flow polymers has been
created for fibres and films. Bicomponent fibres and spunbonds with a PP sheath
on a Kraton core, the sheath buckling due to the elasticity of the core, are now
being made. These perform as well as polyurethane/polyethylene bicomponents,
while costing less and being easier to spin. They outperform the cheaper elastic
polypropylene. Further elasticity improvements have been achieved by using an
unspecified “PP Blend” polymer to make the sheath, and these can also confer
more softness and better drape. In addition to disposable hygiene products,
applications in short-life fashion garments are foreseen, where laundering up to
5 times is all that's required.
Asked if the SBC fibres were sticky, Mr Brennan said
they were, but only as spun, and not in the finished product. He thought a fully
elastic diaper was now technically possible, the system costs were now
attractive, but further cost-downs would need to make it practicable.
Open Innovation
Prof. Wim Vanhaverbeke of Hasselt University and
Eindhoven University of Technology ( Belgium ) used Philips as an
example of a company managing to increase innovation rate and introduce more new
products without achieving better growth. He argued their new products
were mainly for stagnating markets and that the way forward should be to focus
on new business creation and “breakaway innovations”. The latter arose when new
products created new markets, and analysis of the new product launches from 108
companies showed that only 14% were in this winning category. However these 14%
created 40% of the improvement in revenue and 60% of the profit improvement.
Breakaway innovations were most likely to arise from an
open innovation strategy, where the internal Basic
Research->Development-> New Product route typical of large
organisations was supplemented by deliberate acquisition of external technology
through external research and technology licensing. Surplus technology would
inevitably be acquired but this would give rise to ideas for new markets and
failing that could later be sold on or licensed to other firms. In this open
model, internal and external development costs combined would be less than the
internal-only costs of the closed model, and revenues would be increased both
from growing your own market and from sales of surplus technologies.
Problems arise from power-play when big companies
collaborate in Open Innovation with small or start-up companies. An over-heavy
approach might kill the spirit of co-operation and entrepreneurship and could
even result in litigation if the approach is perceived as an abuse of power.
Open Innovation management implies OI's integration into the business strategy,
and deliberate enhancement of the connection-making capabilities of the company.
Furthermore, ways of motivating smaller potential partners to want to make
connections need to be devised. Dutch State Mines favour 3-way negotiations
between the potential partner and both their venturing unit and a business unit.
2 deals emerge, and these are packaged to yield “a maximal win-win situation”.
Social Computing
Jaap Favier, VP, R&D Director of Marketing
and Customer Experience at Forrester ( Holland ) argued that processing
power is moving away from the big corporations to the edge of the network where
consumers have ample computing power in their cheap phones and broadband-enabled
laptops to get information from Google, Wikipedia, Trip Advisor, Second Life
etc. The young are particularly prolific at communicating with one another, and
even the increasingly large older generation is relying more on the web for
communication. Corporations are “dropping through the hole in the donut” and
loyalty to brands is diminishing. Forrester surveys show that emailed
recommendations from friends/family, and consumer opinions posted on the web are
trusted as much as if not more than articles in the traditional print and
TV/Radio media, and more than any advertisements. Social networking sites like
“My Space” are allowing individual opinions to be spread very rapidly: corporate
messages are being ignored and marketing now needs a new set of rules.
The on-line communities are pyramidal with 4 levels
of engagement:
• The top 7% are the “creators”, who write their own
blogs and websites, and influence the opinions of others.
• The next 14% are
the “critics” who develop the messages originated by the creators and add new
angles. They write the customer reviews and participate in chat-rooms and
fora.
• The next 21% are the “collectors” who belong to, and chatter on
social networking sites.
• The bottom 58% are the “couch potatoes”, who read
blogs and customer reviews occasionally, but still rely mainly on the
traditional media.
So, future integrated marketing from the
corporations must now:
• Push the Couch Potatoes.
• Provide content to the
Collectors
• Engage in a dialog with the Critics
• Collaborate with and
create a platform for the Creators.
Examples of how this could be achieved are being
provided by:
• Nike, who were allowing their web-site users to
design and buy shoes on-line for €145/pair. This was a loss-leader but it gave
Nike advance information on the colours and styles which were likely to become
popular in the near future.
• American Apparel (and others) have stores in
Second Life which allow consumers to interact and demand new styles, thereby
predicting fashion changes in the real world.
• Endemol has Big Brother on
Second Life – Reality TV in a Virtual World!
The marketing rules were therefore being rewritten:
• Content is King becomes Contact is
King• The medium is the message becomes The Response is
the Message• We call the shots becomes They* call the
shots.*Women are far more likely to share information on line than
men.
Globalisation
Prof. Suzanne Berger of MIT (USA)
observed that the traditional western worry about globalisation - jobs
being exported to the East - was not being borne out by the statistics. These
worries tended to be generated by politicians at election times, and should be
considered as urban myth rather than reality. In 2003, only 13,000 jobs were
transferred from the USA , this being negligible compared with the 140 million
jobs available. The problem is not job losses, but a recent failure to create
sufficient new jobs.
Globalization implies a single world market, with wage
costs, capital costs, interest rates and service costs being uniform worldwide.
This will never happen but the movement toward this ideal is important.
Outsourcing and Offshoring are important mechanisms of globalisation, and the
USA does both together, companies outsourcing mainly offshore. Japan in contrast
just offshores, by for example setting up Japanese companies in low-labour areas
and keeping control of the production process. Either way, Globalisation can
lead to massively fragmented and dispersed production routes, and the best
companies are those that can best cope with the resulting complexity. Their new
workforces can be in China or India and these workforces could be coping with
completely new technologies.
Dell and Gap are examples of US companies dealing with
such complexity. Dell for instance claims its computers are made in the USA on
the basis of 4.5 minutes of assembly in the USA of components sourced all over
the world. Gap manages a complex and globally disperse production chain to
deliver fashion items to Western consumers. Other companies, e.g. Samsung in
electronics and Zara in fashion textiles succeed by operating fully vertical
organisations and yet compete successfully with the fully outsourced and
offshored operations. Zara's verticality gives them unrivalled speed of response
to sudden demand for new fashions.
So, following cheap labour is not necessarily the
winning strategy. Overall system costs are the key. For instance sweaters are
cheaper to make in Italy than in Rumania where wages costs are a tenth of
Italian levels, because the Italian workers skill and versatility allows them to
keep machinery productive for far longer in any given week.
In conclusion, Prof. Berger said globalisation demands a
new breed of corporate leader, capable of being a “boundary spanner” able to
identify and build value chains from widely distributed and fragmented global
resources. Asked if globalisation could be in conflict with sustainability she
thought it could, especially in the textile industry where obtaining the lowest
garment cost could involve shipping part-processed material between continents
several times.
Sustainable
Development
Ioannis Hatzopolous, External Relations Manager,
P&G ( Germany ) introduced EDANA's 2007 Sustainability Report by
reminding us that sustainability is a really simple idea which is really hard to
implement. It requires synergy between economic growth, social responsibility
and environmental stewardship but everyone's life will be improved. For business
it is an opportunity, provided we focus on the solutions rather than the
problems. Reporting data and trends in a transparent and responsible way is part
of the solution and the 2007 report updates the 2005 report and demonstrates
EDANA's commitment to continual improvement of the sustainability of
disposables. The key environmental advances were recorded as:
• Absorbent weight down 40% in 20 years, so energy
required reduced by 32%, global warming potential by 37% and Summer Smog
potential by 43%.
• Disposables and cloth diapers have been shown to be
similar in the latest UK life cycle analysis.
• Diapers account for <0.5%
of all solid waste and about 2-3% of municipal solid waste.
For the future, further reductions in environmental
impact, and better understanding of the waste issues would be sought. The
emerging Mechanical-Biological Pre-treatment technology may allow further waste
volume and biodegradables reduction as required by the EU landfill directive.
Sustainability
in Personal Care
Gabriella Grab Hartman, Senior Equity Analyst at
Sustainable Asset Management ( Switzerland ) explained how SAM, founded
in 1995 to manage sustainability investments, now has CHF 6.2 billion of assets
under management, is the first carbon-neutral company in Switzerland , and now
employs 70 people worldwide from the headquarters in Zurich . They identify
investment opportunities arising from climate change and the concerns
surrounding it by ranking companies for sustainability using a web-based
questionnaire. The sustainability score has been shown to correlate with overall
financial performance. SAM calculates a financial equivalent of the
sustainability score, adds this to the stock markets “finance only” valuation of
the company and arrives at a “Fair Value” which predicts how the share-price
should develop.
Turning attention to the Personal Care sector, Ms
Hartman identified demographic changes, both the ageing of developed country
populations and the rising wealth of the emerging countries, as important. Also,
consumer habit changes (rising expectations from global interconnections on the
web) and resource shortages as the oil supply is depleted would be key drivers.
Transparency, i.e. more reporting of non financial KPI's, Supply Chain
Management (setting high environmental standards for suppliers) and reducing the
environmental impact of the entire supply chain would become increasingly
important.
Incontinence – The future for all?
Björn Uddenberg, Director of Incontinence Care
at SCA ( Sweden ) said that of SCA's €11bn sales, 21% were in personal
care and just over half of this were from sales of the Tena range of
incontinence aids. Despite the title, 60-65% of 85 year olds will be continent
and remain so for the rest of their lives. Incontinence only affects 5-7% of the
population, is three times as prevalent in women as men, and the market for
incontinence aids is growing at 5% per year. SCA lead the world in providing
disposable incontinence products (26% share) followed by KC with 12%, Kendall
with 8%, Hartmann with 7% and Unicharm with 6%. Outside the EU, NA and Japan the
market remains tiny.
The key factors driving growth are:
• Communication: breaking the taboo.
• Discreet,
leak free products.
• Further progress in light female incontinence pad
design.
• Population ageing.
• Reimbursement of costs of products by
health care providers.
Sales to Western light female incontinents, and the 65 –
80 age group would grow by 27% (2005-2025). Sales to the 80+ demographic would
grow fastest at 72%, these numbers assuming an EU population decrease of 2% over
that timescale.
In 2006 the global inco market (valued at €5 billion)
would be 40% institutional care, 26% home care and 34% retail sales, growing at
3, 6 and 8% pa respectively. Institutional products are subject to pressures to
reduce public spending, but they account for less than 1% of national health
spending while affecting >10% of the total value chain.
Product designs have improved markedly in the last
decade with pants, belted briefs and pouches being introduced. Alternatives to
disposables, such as drugs and surgical treatments, will not dramatically change
the rules. Too many people are reluctant to take drugs continuously, or subject
themselves to surgery.
Measuring Quality of Life
Alan Cottenden of University College London
stepped in at short notice to give Mandy Fader's ( University
of Southampton - UK ) paper on the effects of incontinence products on
the quality of life.
QoL was defined as:
• Physical, psychological and social well-being
•
Personal relationships and sexual health
• Freedom from pain
• The
ability to lead the life we wish to.
Effects on QoL should be assessed as part of the
evaluation of an absorbent product and a way of quantifying QoL is needed to
provide hard evidence to justify the development of improved products. Product
Performance Questionnaires can be used to assess the functional characteristics
of a pad (e.g. leakage, fit, discreetness, ease of use, comfort etc), but a QoL
assessment could measure the impact on life, or the “so what” implications of
the PPQ data. Most existing QoL tools measure the improvements in a patients
condition following “cures” brought about by drugs or surgery. Pads are used
simply to manage a condition without affecting a cure or changing the symptoms,
so the existing QoL tools are inappropriate. The University of Southampton is
therefore developing a questionnaire for QoL assessment of incontinence
management where symptoms remain unchanged.
Communicating
the benefits of hygienic disposables
Stephanie Christmann, Communications
Manager of SCA Personal Care and Chair of EDANA's HAPCO Communications working
group introduced the “Right for Hygiene” programme, a 2 year
pan-European initiative arising from collaboration between Hapco and the
Wet-Wipes group.
The objective was to build a series of
communications which:
• Allow the
hygienic disposables industry and its products to be recognised as having
inherent social value.
• Increase knowledge, understanding and acceptance of
hygiene products
• Enable EDANA to be a credible dialog partner with target
audiences
The target audiences were listed as:
• All levels of government policy makers
• Opinion
forming media
• Industry associations especially waste and wastewater
treatment
• Health workers
• Voluntary groups dealing with childbirth
and care
• Nonwovens suppliers
Activities would involve researching the benefits of
hygienic disposables, producing leaflets about the products, and setting up a
dialog with key audiences to create a community of interest.
The EDANA/Solvay MBA project
Laurent Gheerhart, Solvay MBA at the University
of Brussels ( Belgium ) described the Business Field Project where by
teams of 2-4 MBA students would spend 100 man-hours over 3-5 months on a project
submitted by “industry”, while being coached by professionals and having
privileged access to a large information and people network.
EDANA had sponsored a project on medical nonwovens. The
budding MBA's had analysed and modelled the production process and the value
chain and subjected it to the Porter 5-forces analysis. They concluded it was,
for both roll-goods and converted product producers, a relatively unattractive
industry with low margins, high investments and huge competition. However if it
could be located in an emerging country (instead of EU) and could differentiate
itself by adding new services and technology, there could be high market growth
potential. The main advantage of location in an emerging country would be wage
rates, and so the rate of convergence of these wage rates with EU rates would
affect the returns over the life of the project. These studies cost around
€11,000, said to be nominal compared with consultants fees.
Getting More from
MBO's
Chris Fuller, Director of Equilia Ltd (UK)
described the principles of organising, running and exiting an MBO. He
has lived through several management buy-outs and is now sharing his learnings.
Equilia is his own company, formed after he left Accantia, a management buy-out
of the Lil-let tampon business from Smith and Nephew. Accantia was formed in
2000, and sold the South African division of Lil-lets in a separate MBO. Exit
strategy involved selling to a secondary buy-out in 2004 and the company was
split in a further MBO in 2006.
The significance of MBOs was illustrated:
• €160 billion of MBO deals in 2006, up 25% on
2005.
• Private Equity now employs 2.8 million people in the UK , or 19% of
the non-governmental workforce.
• For investors the returns have been
outstanding, and for management, increased wealth, enjoyment and independence
are typical benefits.
• PE funds easily outperform all the stock market
indices over all intervals up to 10 years.
Health economics
Prof Hans Rosling of the Karolinska Institutet (
Sweden ) gave his now famous (You Tube, Google Video) talk using the
“Gapminder” software to illustrate the relationships between health and wealth
in all the countries of the world. A possible relevance to nonwovens came from
his suggestion that the per capita GDP has to be above $10/day for disposable
hygiene products to start to be sold. The paper was not in the proceedings, but
the full performance can be viewed on the web at
The Life-Changing Web
Geleyn Meijer, Group Innovation Director –
LogicaCMG (Holland) observed that the IT industry is going through a
transition from providing products to providing services and thought in future
personal care product provision would be replaced by provision of personal care
services. Such innovations in service provision are not easy to achieve, but
LogicaCMG, claiming to employ 40,000 people in 41 countries, has harnessed this
enormous talent-pool to provide us with the following key principles to guide
the process:
• “Half measures don't deliver innovation”
• “David
can beat Goliath”
• “The internet gives power to the people”
• “Business
model innovation does not come from consumers”
• “Simplicity is not
easy”
• “A business innovation can be made to last”
The speech failed to support the original contention
that personal care services would replace products. The text provided no
examples of innovation from personal care industries. Neither followed EDANA's
printed summary. There were no questions.
Calvin Woodings
3 rd October 2007
