Journal of Business Chemistry October 2026

The October 2026 issue of the Journal of Business Chemistry brings together three contributions that approach some of the most pressing strategic questions facing the chemical industry today: how industrial structures can combine scale with capital discipline, how emerging technologies can reconcile environmental benefits with technical performance, and how companies can make robust sourcing decisions […]

Since around 1990, the chemicals industries of Germany/Europe and China have diverged. In Europe, integrated groups were broken up to remove conglomerate discounts and maximise enterprise value. This created shareholder value but sacrificed scale, integration and strategic control. In China, the state built large integrated platforms to control value chains, secure supply and gain market […]

Bio-based materials could reduce the environmental and supply-chain burdens of batteries, but their technical and economic consequences remain uncertain. This paper addresses these uncertainties by eliciting judgments from 35 experts who evaluated six bio-based battery innovations across various dimensions, including specific energy, lifetime, material cost, production cost, carbon-dioxide emissions, and recycling capability. Across 210 innovation […]

Manufacturers sourcing bio-based, synthetic, and mineral feedstocks face growing uncertainty from regulatory change, climate impacts, and market volatility. Existing approaches, including scenario planning and quantitative optimization, remain loosely coupled and offer limited support for assessing robustness at the level of strategic performance indicators. This study develops a scenario-based robustness diagnostics framework linking exogenous context drivers, […]