Battery materials
Trendsetting technologies and materials for lithium-ion batteries and battery systems of the future.
Norway
BASF New Business GmbH
Foresight & Scouting
New challenges are arising from global megatrends, such as the growing world population and the rising demand for energy and raw materials, as well as climate protection.
Identifying future market opportunities
The worldwide Foresight & Scouting unit of BASF New Business identifies new business areas and market opportunities beyond the existing businesses of BASF. We evaluate how the company’s chemical and technological know-how can contribute to the development of these business areas and guide these ideas through incubation to commercial viability.
A sampling of our success stories
Here are a few examples of ideas and concepts that we have turned into business.
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Chemistry as a key to innovation
Like the chemical industry, BASF sees itself as a key driver of innovations. With new products, materials, systems and technologies, BASF makes an important contribution to sustainable solutions for the pressing problems of the future.
Innovations for future markets
We focus on identifying challenges and developing innovations based on chemistry to solve these challenges. The activities of BASF New Business center on the development of forward-looking concepts for the further development of BASF.
Interdisciplinary teamwork
Our Foresight & Scouting unit comprises the Industry Foresight and Scouting groups. They work hand in hand to evaluate market trends, identify future markets, spot and develop trailblazing innovations and successfully establish these in the market.
How we work
Find out more about our Industry Foresight and Scouting groups.
The Industry Foresight group of BASF New Business identifies and analyzes business opportunities in growth industries outside of BASF’s current portfolio. Our aim is to develop a focused, logical and practical forward-looking view to enable a better understanding of the future.
We constantly broaden our expert knowledge of current and future customer industries. We systematically identify the problems and needs of customer industries and use this insight to pinpoint new business opportunities, always with a view to their market attractiveness and suitability for BASF’s future portfolio. Finally, we prioritize business opportunities, which are then further developed by the Scouting group.
To rapidly identify innovation opportunities, the Industry Foresight group systematically works with in-house and external industry experts, using scenario technologies and open innovation tools. It also benefits from cooperative partnerships with customers, research institutes and consultants.
The task of the Scouting group is to assess the new business ideas identified by the Industry Foresight group and further develop them to the basic commercial concept.
We describe in detail the expected future needs of the market, the market structure and the value chain. We also identify and evaluate different potential solutions in which chemistry plays a crucial role in the value chain. Moreover, we define current and future technology benchmarks and identify and assess technology leaders.
In addition, we draw up the basic market entry strategies. The team members lead and develop the projects as entrepreneurs, with flexibility playing a key role in realizing the innovations. We operate worldwide to cater for the different needs and developments in regional markets.