WACKER’s Corporate Research Facility – the “Consortium”

The Consortium’s research activities focus on highly promising markets, in other words, global megatrends. The chemical industry is expected to supply more than just chemicals. What the markets demand are functional materials with defined properties that will solve specific problems.

That’s why the Consortium no longer starts by developing new chemical substances and then trying to find applications for them. Instead, we take the exact opposite approach: we identify challenges that the market faces, extrapolate the property sets needed to meet those challenges, and then specifically develop new materials that draw upon our core competencies.

WACKER maintains an intense dialogue, and pursues fruitful collaborations, with the scientific community. We work with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), for instance, to maintain the WACKER Institute of Silicon Chemistry, which serves as an important source of ideas for our own research work. Intense collaboration between industry and academia is essential if Europe is to be competitive – A further advantage for having Europe as a center of research is that the continent’s established legal systems are designed to protect intellectual property.