An interview with our R&D Director, Özlem Ünlü Işık, sharing her perspectives on the impact of digitalisation on R&D processes and the future of R&D, was published in European Coatings, one of the industry’s leading international publications, on 8 September 2026.

In the interview, Özlem Ünlü Işık highlights that digitalisation in R&D goes beyond improving efficiency. It represents a strategic transformation that enables years of formulation knowledge, test results and technical experience to become an accessible, traceable and sustainable organisational knowledge base.

Our approach to digitalisation focuses on making more effective use of historical R&D data, building a shared and structured information infrastructure, and strengthening the flow of knowledge between R&D, manufacturing, technical service, regulatory affairs and sales teams. Digital systems also enable increasingly complex global chemical regulations and customer requirements to be considered at earlier stages of the product development process.

By making historical formulation and testing data easier to access and analyse, the aim is to enable researchers to spend less time searching for information and repeating previous work, and more time on scientific problem-solving, developing new formulation approaches and driving innovation. In this way, digitalisation is expected to support both higher-quality R&D decisions and more effective innovation processes.

The interview also underlines that artificial intelligence and digital technologies should strengthen scientific expertise rather than replace it. In the R&D environment of the future, where technology takes on more routine and repetitive tasks, human experience, scientific judgement and creativity will continue to play a critical role in creating innovation and customer value.
 

As Özlem Ünlü Işık states:

“Digitalisation should ultimately free scientists to do more science, not less.”