Adichai Mathurapojchanakul believes research and development (R&D) is key to the long-term competitiveness of any business, and there is no substitute.

The 56-year-old self-made businessman currently holds seven patents on a series of innovations for air-conditioning, heating and related industrial equipment.

In addition, he has more than 20 patent applications pending at the Intellectual Property Department.

"I've been a street-smart inventor all my life, ever since I started working at the age of 13. My existing patents include ones for an overhead cooling system, a hot-water tank and a refrigeration-servicing device," says Adichai, who barely finished his primary school education.

"I was also the first to manufacture industrial spray-painting robots locally about 15 years ago."

In 2004, he turned his attention to energy-saving devices, particularly for air-conditioning and heating systems, and set up Tycoon Research and Development Ltd Part to pursue his work.

"Lately I've filed more than 20 patent applications for these devices, related designs and other tools. I'm confident that approval will be granted as soon as it can be proved in the laboratory that my ideas can really save up to 20 per cent of the energy consumed by an air-conditioning system," he says.

"The solution is basically to manage

the pressure inside the air-conditioning system so that we can restart the compressor units with a minimum loss of

energy.

"Theoretically, the energy saving should be significant, since compressor units are cut off and restarted every 1-3 minutes while the air-con is on. Recently, a long-established US firm introduced a part of this concept in their products," says Adichai.

"Earlier, I also invented a combined hot-tank and air-con unit that recycles the energy from the latter system to produce hot water free of charge."

Given the growing environmental concerns due to global warming, Adichai hopes his energy-saving efforts will receive stronger state support.

"For instance, the hot-tank air-con is subject to an additional excise tax, making it more expensive in the market, so the product is not yet marketed widely," he says.

"I've been in the air-con business for the past two decades, with a factory producing air-cons and related products. Today, the factory generates an annual sales turnover of Bt70 million to Bt80 million.

"Based on my experience, most local R&D efforts start from what could be called C&D - copy and develop. In the old days, successful C&D works included locally-made printing equipment, forged steel etc. Back then, the economics was that if we could make high-quality substitution equipment or products cheaper than the imports, by say 50-100 per cent, then there would be a market for these items domestically.

"Based on those initial successes, we could then upgrade to do R&D work, which has been rare in Thai industries because it's more capital intensive and time-consuming. In my case, I was lucky to have earned a significant sum on one of my earlier patents leased to a large Thai air-con maker. That seed money helped pay for my later R&D work," Adichai says.

"In other words, it's easier for businesses to do just trading - such as importing foreign-made products for domestic sale - than to put in much greater resources to develop new products, which can be a risky effort.

"However, as we sign more and more free-trade agreements with other countries, Thai industries will find it more difficult to survive foreign competition if we do not have enough indigenous innovation."

Adichai is very clear that Thailand needs to urgently invest a lot of effort into promoting local R&D capabilities.

"Without our own patents and copyrights, we will have to pay fees to use other countries' intellectual property, so there is no other choice," he warns.

Nophakhun Limsamarnphun

nop1122@yahoo.com