Hopefully, this book has highlighted why it is necessary to look at the process holistically.

There is in addition an even larger picture and that is the more global view. This global view includes many more factors that can affect the business decisions and can include technology and social and legal trends. Of these, the ones that tend to be of immediate interest are the technology developments and trends.

There should be no illusions there are as many threats to the business as there are opportunities.

There are developments in conducting polymers, printing technology, and atmospheric processing that will be a threat to vacuum web coating processes in years to come.

An example of this is in the solar energy industry where the conversion of sunlight into electricity can be done by high-cost, high-efficiency or by low-cost, low-efficiency solar cells. Currently, single crystal or polycrystalline devices are available, which are manufactured using semiconductor processing techniques or amorphous solar cells that are manufactured using roll-to-roll web processing. The amorphous cells are cheaper to manufacture than the crystalline devices but with a lower efficiency. The threat to both is the printed all-polymer solar cells that are now being developed. At the time of writing this book, these have achieved an efficiency of 5% but this is expected to double to 10% within a couple of years, which will challenge the amorphous cells and is expected to be at a fraction of the manufacturing cost.

Another industry that has a similar dynamic is the...