KEYWORDS: Plasma, innovation management, N-fixation, Fertilizer, Birkeland-Eyde process, Industrial history.
ABSTRACT: This article features a historic industrial development concerning chemical synthesis of nitric acid from nitrogen, the Birkeland-Eyde process, which was started up in 1903. The whole development was done at great technological risk and also at the financial risk of having not enough backup by investors. It is a truly systemic development which needed a full team with different skills. In a similar way, networking was needed to ensure to have investors supporting the costly development and scale-up. Already at that time, this was a multinational initiative and an ad-site evaluation of a multi-headed expert team gave the final decision. The decision, while aiming at thorough technological check, was finally guided by the motivation and interaction capability of the developers. Thus, the human factor was finally decisive in a complex systemic development. This historic recap provides a nice learning curve as well for today’s innovation management.

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