Dow Honored for Five Breakthrough Innovations at 2015 Edison Awards

Five very different yet equally impactful products from The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE: DOW) are being honored at the 2015 Edison Awards, an annual event recognizing products and people that deliver “game changing” innovations to their respective fields.

“Innovation is a key driver of Dow’s growth strategy, with nearly 30 percent of our revenue coming from new products,” said A.N. Sreeram, Dow corporate vice president of Research & Development. “The Dow products named as Edison Award finalists help demonstrate the breadth and depth of our portfolio – representing solutions from electronics to automotive, to personal care and packaging.”

Building on the heritage of Thomas Edison and the 27-year history of the Edison Awards, the program recognizes innovations that not only address a need and solve a problem but also seize an opportunity and create a new market or industry. Nominees are evaluated on concept, value, delivery and impact — each criterion mirroring the known innovation guidelines of Edison himself.

With five products named finalists, Dow received more nominations than any other company. The winners in each category will be announced Thursday, April 23 during a ceremony at the New York Academy of Sciences. Dow teams received nominations for the following innovations:

• BETAMATE™ Structural Adhesives. Lighter materials enable increased fuel efficiency for vehicles. But manufacturers often struggle to reduce weight without compromising strength. BETAMATE Structural Adhesives replace welds and fasteners while improving safety and stability. Since their introduction in 1999, BETAMATE Adhesives have already contributed to an estimated 2.65 billion gallons of gasoline savings.
• PacXpert™ Packaging Technology. Food and product packaging that achieves greater functionality with less resources helps limit our impact on the environment. PacXpert Packaging Technology uses 50 percent less material than many of the rigid containers available in the market. The flexible packaging technology increases transportation and warehouse efficiency and enables consumers to achieve better product yields, leading to potentially reduced carbon emissions.
• SOLDERON™ BP TS 6000 Tin-Silver. For decades, electronic devices have relied on lead-based materials for durable and reliable connections between chips and circuit boards. Given the well-known issues with lead, there has been a strong effort to remove it from electronics. SOLDERON BP Tin-Silver is a lead-free solder formulation that ensures device performance, reliability and application flexibility.
• POLYOX™ Water-Soluble Polymers. Handwashing with soap is among the most effective and inexpensive ways to prevent a range of diseases. Yet for millions, soap is considered a luxury item. Used widely in health and hygiene applications, POLYOX Water Soluble Polymers has brought distinct performance benefits to Unilever’s LifeBuoy™ soap, resulting in a more affordable—and life changing— hygienic product for those in economically challenged regions.
• AFFINISOL™ HPMC HME. More than 70% of new active pharmaceutical ingredients have limited bioavailability, meaning that they cannot deliver the intended therapeutic effect in the body due to improper absorption. As a consequence, many potentially life-saving therapies never make it to market. AFFINISOL HPMC HME helps ensure proper delivery for many of these active ingredients, opening the door to new treatment options for more patients.

“True breakthroughs happen when we have a seat at our customer’s design table to inspire collaborative innovation — and that was certainly the case across all of the Dow products nominated for Edison Awards this year,” said David Bem, Dow R&D vice president of Consumer and Infrastructure Solutions businesses. “In the future, solving complex global challenges will require even more collaboration between industry, academia and consumers to produce lasting solutions.”

The Edison Awards are named after Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) whose extraordinary new product and market development methods garnered him 1,093 U.S. patents and made him a household name across the world.

Dow shares in Edison’s passion for ingenuity and patent productivity; the company was recently named for the fourth consecutive year to the Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Innovators list, which recognizes corporations and institutions around the world that are at the heart of innovation, as measured by a series of proprietary patent-related metrics.

Dow’s research and development engine was responsible for more than 635 U.S. patents granted in 2014 — exceeding the previous year’s all-time record by more than 10 percent.

For more on Dow’s innovation efforts, visit www.dow.com/innovation.

About Dow

Dow (NYSE: DOW) combines the power of science and technology to passionately innovate what is essential to human progress. The Company is driving innovations that extract value from the intersection of chemical, physical and biological sciences to help address many of the world's most challenging problems such as the need for clean water, clean energy generation and conservation, and increasing agricultural productivity. Dow's integrated, market-driven, industry-leading portfolio of specialty chemical, advanced materials, agrosciences and plastics businesses delivers a broad range of technology-based products and solutions to customers in approximately 180 countries and in high-growth sectors such as packaging, electronics, water, coatings and agriculture. In 2014, Dow had annual sales of more than $58 billion and employed approximately 53,000 people worldwide. The Company's more than 6,000 products are manufactured at 201 sites in 35 countries across the globe. References to "Dow" or the "Company" mean The Dow Chemical Company and its consolidated subsidiaries unless otherwise expressly noted. More information about Dow can be found at www.dow.com.

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