Challenging the impacts of climate change
In order to reply to the consequences of the climate change, agendas and initiatives have been introduced to align business strategies and activities with the natural environment. The chemical industry tries to counteract their bad reputation as a high pollution sector by voluntarily reporting on environmental indicators and initiating programs like Responsible Care, SusChem or Chem3. However, the implementation of these strategies represents a major challenge and a lot of open questions remain. When will environmentally friendly products and technologies be competitive to established ones? How can chemical companies and related industry actors accelerate the reduction of raw material use and emissions? Some insights contributing to the future orientation and organization of the chemical sector are presented in the present issue of the Journal of Business Chemistry.
The research paper of the present issue “Impacts of the REACH candidate list of substances subject to authorisation: The reputation mechanism and empirical results on behavioral adaptations of German supply chain actors” is written by Guido Grunwald and Philipp Hennig. On the basis of behavioral psychology theories, the authors develop hypotheses in order to analyze the effects of the so-called candidate list on manufacturers, users and distributors of chemicals. More precise, the authors discuss how the inclusion of chemical substances of very high concern into the authorisation list of the EU chemicals regulation affects the risk communication and reputation of supply chain actors on the basis of a survey conducted by the European Commission.
The first article of our Practitioner’s Section “On the current practice of New Business Development in the German chemical industry” by Thorsten Daubenfeld, Thorsten Bergmann, Niklas Frank and Lisa Weidenfeld provides insights into the current practice of New Business Development, including its corresponding objectives and organizational setup. Based on a survey among managers of various chemical companies and related business sectors, New Business Development appears to be a heterogeneous subject in the chemical industry. The study, for instance, outlines that structural differences of New Business Development setups are caused by firm size.
The paper by Tobias Viere et al. “Integrated Resource Efficiency Analysis for Reducing Climate Impacts in the Chemical Industry” describes the approach of an interdisciplinary research project to identify possibilities aiming at improving the resource efficiency of chemical production systems. The comprehensive resource efficiency analysis developed is characterized by an IT-based platform integrating various methods and tools such as material flow cost accounting to enable a simulation-based material flow network optimization. The authors highlight the importance and benefits of their approach by illustrating exemplary cases at chemical production sites.
In the article “Account Management 2.0: From Silo Thinking to Integrated Account Development”, Ralf Schmidt and Olaf Lange introduce a double loop process of account management. This new perspective on account management considers cultural-psychological factors of organizational development that have a massive impact on the success of account management. By applying the double loop process, firms specifically develop and implement customer-based strategies and, in so doing, benefit from the customer- and profit-oriented alignment of internal decision-making processes.
Please enjoy reading the second issue of the eleventh volume of the Journal of Business Chemistry. We are grateful for the support of all authors and reviewers. If you have any comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact us at contact@businesschemistry.org.
Carsten Gelhard, Executive Editor Birte Golembiewski, Executive Editor
(cg@businesschemistry.org) (bg@businesschemistry.org)