Joining the Team

February 23, 2023

Prior to joining P&G, Kapil Krishan was an assistant professor of physics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. At a conference he organized to foster industry collaborations, a P&G Research Fellow approached him, saying, “We don’t want to collaborate with you, we want to hire you.”

Kapil now leads the #haircare Product testing labs at P&G Singapore Innovation Center (SgIC) that supports a multibillion dollar P&G hair care business. As a lead technologist, his main challenge was to bring robust scientific testing out of the lab to capture the key ‘moments of truth’ in consumer’s life as she judges her hair.

Bringing tests from lab to life required a different approach to problem-solving. To make the shift, Kapil realized that “he needed to re-craft and re-define problem to lay a deeper foundation of the solution space.” It’s fortunate that as a rare physicist in the company who has closely collaborated with #biologists and #chemists at the SgIC and across the broader Singapore innovation ecosystem, he has extensive experience in re-skilling and re-defining problems.

With a hand-picked team, Kapil’s programs have racked up prized patents, paved the way for remarkable innovations linked deeply with consumer behaviors: Smart combs that monitor hair quality and combing experience. Sensor-enabled product dispensing bottles that track product usage and habits. Novel imaging systems to quantify degradation of hair styles.

Many of these methodologies are housed at custom-designed Beauty Studio, which looks like an upscale hair salon, but is really a state-of-the-art lab in disguise. Its discreet sensor-arrayed spaces have yielded powerful insights that ultimately led to superior products, such as shampoos with faster fragrance and lather blooms tailored for men, who typically take brief showers. His team’s capabilities have also aided the development of novel sustainable product forms that uses less water.

And who knows what’s next? For now, he’s excited to bring the future one step closer with his research.

#Haircare