Working in the chemical industries, plural

A person stepping from a large black arrow onto a path made up of colourful arrows pointing in different directions

Source: © Huan Tran/Ikon Images

Despite often being presented as a monolith, there’s a huge variety of activities, working practices and reaction scales across industrial research

Several years ago I attended my first official industry/academia collaboration event as an early career industry member. I was excited as it was my first business meeting. However, when an academic asked me of their research direction, ‘but what does industry want?’, I couldn’t provide a satisfying answer.