Based on the experience of the pharmaceutical industry, a new trend in research which relies upon combinatorial methodologies is being used to characterize the complexities of polymer adhesion. In this article, we begin the discussion with a brief background description of conventional techniques that are used for characterizing polymer interfaces. This background description not only highlights the key quantities that are used to describe interfacial strength, but it also demonstrates the challenges of developing high-throughput screening methods for this field. Next, we introduce three novel methods that use combinatorial design to increase the throughput in knowledge discovery for polymer adhesion. This introduction discusses the experimental protocol as well as the main features of analysis and informatics for these techniques. (C) 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.