At the core of IRPC’s innovation strategy, the IRPC Innovation Center serves as a dedicated research and development hub, supporting the Company’s business goals and sustainability objectives. Guided by the mission to ‘Transform Knowledge and Expertise into Innovation to Generate Sustainable Revenue’, the Center focuses on driving innovation to enhance the growth of core businesses (“Core Uplift”) and explore new opportunities beyond the existing portfolio (“Step up and Beyond”), while emphasizing extensive collaboration (“IN/OUT”) with partners to accelerate product commercialization.

The Core Uplift strategy focuses on internal collaboration to transform the core business into specialty products, aiming to increase specialty product sales to 60% by 2030. The strategy targets 5 key industries: packaging, electronics, construction, automotive, and healthcare and hygiene. Using a stage-and-gate approach via digitalization (Innovation and Technology Management System: ITMS+), the process ensures structured decision-making, monitors progress and aligns innovation projects with business goals to deliver measurable outcomes.

The Step Up and Beyond strategy leverages an incubation center approach to explore new innovations and business models, preparing them for commercialization. The strategy integrates 2 key programs:

• De Novo Program: A research initiative focused on evaluating the technical feasibility and market potential of new ideas, culminating in the development of a lab-scale prototype.
• Sandbox Program: An incubation initiative designed to refine innovative ideas by creating field prototypes for testing in real-world business environments, fostering collaboration, experimentation, and ultimately transforming innovations into market-ready solutions or new business opportunities.

Through the process of creating new businesses by collaborating with external experts (Outside-In), new opportunities will be generated and gaps in the business path will be addressed through strategic partnerships, joint ventures, and investments.

The focus will be on sustainable agriculture, nano-carbon technology, as well as healthcare and life sciences for the improvement of life.

In alignment with these strategic objectives, the Analytical and Laboratory Center (AL) plays a critical role in supporting IRPC’s core businesses. The AL collaborates closely with internal units to ensure product quality and streamline the production process. Committed to world-class analytical and testing services, the AL has invested in cutting-edge equipment, laboratory information management system and boasts a team of skilled professionals. The center is also accredited to ISO/IEC 17025, an international standard for testing laboratories. Beyond supporting IRPC’s core businesses, the AL generates revenue by providing services to external organizations.

IRPC is committed to advancing research and development (R&D) to deliver innovative and environmentally friendly products that meet diverse customer needs while supporting sustainable growth. To achieve this, R&D efforts focus on cross-functional collaboration among marketing, production engineering, and other stakeholders throughout the product development value chain. At the same time, IRPC has strengthened its R&D ecosystem by increasing the number of talented researchers, enhancing their capabilities, and investing in advanced research equipment and instruments. These improvements aim to accelerate product development, reduce costs, enhance margins, and improve product competitiveness, enabling the company to respond swiftly to evolving customer requirements and adapt to changes in the economy, society, and environment.

Innovation is a process that depends on a variety of factors such as knowledge, experience and creativity. To access, collect and combine those factors, a variety of collaborative input channels are available.
Open Innovation Management has been focusing on strategic formulation to drive successful R&D Product & Technology Roadmap execution, seeking new technology to fulfill product development portfolio by opening innovation with academic and research institutes such as VISTEC and NSTDA including cooperation with international technology incubator to invest in technology startup companies. In addition, to increase capability of product commercialization, a simulation tool has been applied for product scale up.
IRPC is advancing towards a brighter future with the opening of the IRPC Innovation Center in Rayong. The center serves as a hub for incubating, developing, and creating innovations using advanced technologies to enhance IRPC’s products, improve competitiveness, and differentiate them in ways that deliver valuable outcomes for the environment and society.
It also aims to reduce reliance on foreign technologies and create opportunities to own technologies (Licensor), aligning with IRPC’s vision.