Kurt Swogger
Dow Chemical Co.
Inducted 2024
Kurt Swogger (1950 – ) was a key technology and business leader during his tenure at Dow Chemical from 1972 to 2008. His leadership brought high-throughput catalyst research to Dow, which then spread across the plastics industry. The ripple effect of his work continues to make a profound impact on our world today.
In 1991, Swogger became the Global R&D director for Dow’s polyolefin product business when it was losing money. He quickly realized the opportunities of the new metallocene catalyst technology. He and his research team linked the technology with materials science, process technology, and marketing for new product innovations. Dow trademarked this new network as INSITE® Technology, which resulted in many new families of high-performance and high-value polyolefin plastics, plastomers, and elastomers. These have provided extraordinary benefits to human lives and have very high commercial value for Dow.
Many of Dow’s polyolefin innovations have been enabled by INSITE technology, providing populations worldwide with greater access to fresh foods, safe drinking water, and medicines. Reduced food waste and hygienic materials for health care have directly resulted in four times lower environmental costs in the supply chain. Swogger represented the INSITE team in receiving the Medal of Technology from President George Bush in 2002.
Swogger created a new R&D and business development philosophy named Speed Base to make this breakthrough product portfolio possible. Using Speed Base, Dow could innovate new products up to three times faster using 40% fewer resources than the industrial average. Speed Base later became a study case in many major business school MBA programs. For this, Swogger was granted the highest honor bestowed to technology development management by the American Chemical Society in 2002.
After retiring from Dow in 2008, Swogger founded Molecular Rebar Design. The company developed a new form of carbon nanotubes for plastics, rubber reinforcement, and energy storage devices. Swogger is the inventor or co-inventor of over 33 US Patents and more than 130 World Patents.