One of the presentations I saw at a recent cement industry event was on a rare topic: A technological trial that had not succeeded. After the presentation, a delegate mentioned to me that their company had been considering the same approach and would now reconsider. They were grateful to the presenter for saving them considerable time, money and stress.
This got me thinking. How many others - who might not have not seen the presentation - are currently attempting the same failed approach? How many thousands of innovations that looked great on paper but failed to stand-up to reality are currently languishing in R&D departments around the world? Both are impossible to tell.
By extension, what if there was a way to communicate concepts in our sector that never got off the ground? Would it speed up technological development? This certainly seems like a sensible suggestion and perhaps one that is worth pursuing. It would work by directing efforts away from dead-ends towards more promising avenues.
When I worked in a research laboratory, we often joked that it would be great to have a hypothetical Journal of Dead-End Chemistry, or J. Dead. Chem. to use its correct abbreviation. However, we concluded that - in our area at least - the approaches that didn’t work vastly outnumbered those that did, which would lead to an impossibly large number of articles, not to mention a very stressed editor!
And herein lies just one of the problems with publishing negative results. While J. Dead. Chem. might just about work in academia, a hypothetical Journal of Dead-End Cement (J. Dead. Cem.) would have to consider a highly-competitive business environment that adds additional hurdles. There are intellectual property rights and jumpy legal departments. What if the company is sitting on a failure that might be relevant in 10 or 20 years’ time? We also have to consider relentlessly-positive marketing departments that are averse to highlighting even the smallest of shortcomings. At Global Cement, we present ‘customer success stories’ because nobody wants to present ‘customer failure stories.’ We feature Best Available Technology (BAT), not Worst Available Technology (WAT). This leads to an informative picture overall, but one that necessarily lies against a ‘social media-esque’ backdrop, where success appears to be the default outcome. Of course, this simply isn’t true. However you cut it, real-world interests would prevent J. Dead. Cem. from ever taking off. Just like the ideas it would try to present, J. Dead. Cem. fails for a reason.
While we might not be able to access a onestop- shop for aborted missions, there is markedly increased collaboration across different players in our sector. Schemes such as the Global Cement & Concrete Association’s Innovandi Open Challenge seek to bring down the barriers between different parts of our industry, with consortia of different suppliers, cement producers and start-ups all working together. In doing so, they are sharing information relevant to and speeding up developments in the most pressing research topic of all - decarbonisation. In a similar vein, the technology to activate clay without calcination by thyssenkrupp Polysius and Schwenk Zement - launched at the recent Global FutureCem Conference was - in the words of ThyssenKrupp’s Luc Rudowski - the product of ‘full transparency. There is no differentiation between client and supplier.’ We can expect a lot more project-specific collaboration to blur the boundaries between traditional roles in the coming years and decades, a point also made by Gregory Bernstein and Lawrie Evans, the authors of our recent series on cement through the decades.
There’s much to be gained from being a bit more open in the cement sector, indeed in life in general. To that end, if you have an article for ‘J. Dead. Cem.’ that you would like to publish, let me know!