“Something Should Be Done” – Nanotechnology: a UK Industry View

On January 17, 2010, in Europe, Nanotech, Publications, by Tim

The new report “Nanotechnology: a UK Industry View” finally surfaced, and its recommendations are to spend more money, develop more skills, have more dialogue and..sorry, I must have nodded off, but it’s pretty standard stuff, and the recommendations are exactly the same as every other nanotech report produced over the past ten years.

I have to question why we go through this process again and again and again, with each report calling for the same things and nothing ever changing. We need to establish a few ground rules if UK nanotechnology is ever going to break out of it’s post Oxonica rut:

  1. Stop calling for more government money to be spent on stuff, it is as effective as wring a letter to Santa Claus. Unless you have been living in a cave (or an ivory tower) for the past year you will know that the UK government doesn’t have any, and the little it has left will go on ring fencing politically significant projects such as the National Health Service.  Forking over huge sums to an ‘industry’ that has been characterised by hype followed by spectacular crashes simply isn’t going to happen, no matter how many reports get written.
  2. Stop calling for The Government to do something – in this case “assisting the banking and insurance companies in understanding nanotechnology to enable sound investments to be made.” The Government won’t exist after May, and until then no one will have much interest in nanotechnology compared to saving their careers. If you want the Government to do something useful, ask them to make sure that a business and innovation friendly climate exists.
  3. Stop expecting anyone to do take any action as a result of educating and informing people about nanotechnology. No banker or investor is interested in being educated about nanotechnology, but we all love good business ideas.
  4. Get out of the ghetto. The UK nanotechnology industry only exists in the mind of people who produce reports like this. Creating an artificial entity just so that targets can be set and measured is pointless and there are far more effective ways of measuring the impact of a technology on an economy.
  5. Make the best use of existing resources – we have a variety of nanotech facilities already up and running (although I’m still not quite sure Nanoforce is supposed to do, something with the creative industries?) so it should be possible to  leverage entrepreneurial expertise and external cash to make sure that these can create the economic impact that was undoubtedly promised in their initial funding applications.

Anyway, here’s their version….

POLICY AND REGULATION

1. Nanotechnology innovation and exploitation is business driven.The department responsible for leading and coordinating nanotechnology activities across Government should be the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to ensure investment provides added value for the UK.

2. TheTechnology Strategy Board must implement its NanoscaleTechnologies Strategy with specific funded calls to deliver commercialisation of value adding nanotechnology based products.

3. Government should address the need for responsible development of all emerging technologies, including nanotechnologies, by putting in place a framework through which product risk assessments can be carried out alongside industry’s need to focus on innovation.

4. Defra, other Government Departments, relevant KTNs and trade associations should engage with industry to ensure the effective operation of a simplified Voluntary Reporting Scheme in the UK for nanomaterials and to work with EU regulators to ensure ongoing REACh regulations take account of nanotechnology fully and effectively.

SKILLS

1. Develop world class professional education programmes at all levels covering all aspects of nanotechnology.

2. Improve and promote vocational training in nanotechnology from technician level to develop individuals with the skills and expertise to support commercialisation of nanotechnology in the UK.

FUNDING

1. Provide more accessible and commercially focussed funding for SMEs as well as larger companies engaged in the development of nanotechnology based products to support innovation in the UK.

2. Invest in key establishments and organisations to build world class capability in nanotechnology product development.

3. Provide funding for cross-sectoral initiatives to apply developments achieved in one sector to other sectors and applications.

4. Continue to invest in standardisation activities to maintain UK leadership in creating international standards for nanotechnology and National Measurement System facilities.

5. Continue to support knowledge transfer activities to deliver innovation in nanotechnology and pull through academic research into commercial applications.

ENGAGEMENT

1. Ensure that the general public is informed of product developments based on nanotechnology.

2. Industry and Government should engage in an evidence based dialogue with the Unions and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs).

3. Provide support for two-way international collaboration to gather and share information on nanotechnology.

4. Government and industry should assist banking and insurance companies in understanding nanotechnology to enable sound investments to be made.

Tagged with:
 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

UK Nanotech Stagnates? – Update

On January 16, 2010, in Europe, by Tim

I’m still confused by the new UK KTN report on nanotech – perhaps if someone could actually produce a copy it would help! Typical of the mixed or garbled messages is

“The success of nanotechnology should be industry-led, and we are proposing that BIS takes responsibility for co-ordinating nanotech in other government departments, academia and industry,” Barry Park, Nanotechnology KTN manager for manufacturing and processing, said at an event in London on Thursday.

I can’t tell whether this is calling for industry or Government to lead things. Is the KTN confused or just the reporter? The report also claims that

the sector is highly fragmented, with few large companies and many SMEs. In addition, there is supply chain complexity, and it is difficult to transfer intellectual property from academia to industry.

As I noted yesterday, I think they may be barking up the wrong tree.

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

UK Nanotech Stagnates?

On January 15, 2010, in Europe, Nanotech, Publications, by Tim

Here’s an interesting snippet from an FT report about a forthcoming report by the UK Knowledge Transfer Network on nanotechnologies

The report found that UK investment in nanotechnology was low. Per capita public funding was $1.96 (£1.20) in 2008, compared with $5.06 for the US and $6.07 for Germany.

As we all know, getting reliable funding numbers is very tricky, and the recent devaluation of the pound against the Euro will have distorted numbers by 20-30%, but it does seem from this that the UK is losing its way in nanotechnology.

Perhaps a more reliable indicator of progress would be the number of new companies turning up, but unfortunately every UK Nanotech event seems to draw the same crowd. Some of them are great companies and good friends, but it does seem to qualitatively indicate a degree of stagnation, at least among what would be classed as ‘nanotech companies.’

This mirrors, to a large extent, the picture worldwide. The last few years have seen a shift from nanotechnology being used as a reason to found a company to it becoming just another piece of the toolkit. As a result the number of companies calling themselves ‘nano’ has not really increased even as the penetration of the technology has.

Getting rid of the obsession with a ‘nanotechnology industry’ would help get a real sense of the impact of nanotechnologies.

Tagged with:
 
1 Comments
Leave A Response

House of Lords set to publish it’s long awaited report on “Nanotechnologies and Food”

On January 5, 2010, in Europe, Nanotech, Products, Publications, by Tim

The UK’s House of Lords is to publish its long awaited report on “Nanotechnologies and Food” this week, but it’s all top secret until a minute past midnight on Friday. We’re curious to see whether the report contains some of oft quoted but wildly inaccurate numbers and/or calls for the usual ‘further public consultation’ or indeed whether there are any actionable conclusions at all, something sadly lacking in UK government science and technology publications of late.

Reports from some of the folks interviewed  suggest that the committee wasn’t the stereotypical bunch of old buffers put out to grass and that there was some real knowledge involved. You can see the evidence given here, and a bit about how the UK Government views nanotechnology and food here.


 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Happy New Year – 10 Years of TNT Weekly!

On January 5, 2010, in Europe, Nanotech, Publications, by Tim

This year we are celebrating ten years of TNT Weekly which has progressed from an email newsletter based on manually trawling the web to a blog and twitter feed over the years. When we started it looked more like the example from January 2001 below.

While the format may have changed, the mission hasn’t, and we still hope that we provide not just a source of information but also an enjoyable read.

Happy New Year!

TNT Weekly

Week 2, 2001.

The Trends in Nanotechnology (TNT) newsletter provides links and introductions to articles and press releases that have appeared on the web in the last week on the subject of nanotechnology.  It is widely believed that in the near future nanotechnology will spawn a variety of world-changing industries, leveraging developments in a broad range of scientific disciplines, from the biological sciences, through chemistry and classical and quantum physics.

The editorial team that compiles this newsletter consists of leaders from the scientific & business communities. A key advantage of our editorial team is the ability to cut through the nanotechnology hype. As such, we will occasionally bring you some of that hype (and our critique) to assist in the learning process for those who need it.

Our mission is twofold:

- to inform researchers in all disciplines relevant to nanotechnology, a field where, like no other in history, multidisciplinary collaborations will bear the greatest fruit

- to provide lay and business readers with access to the latest and most relevant information on research and existing and upcoming businesses poised to capitalise on the vast potential of nanotechnology

Given the diversity of these two groups, our focus is on providing a concise, readable, first-stop resource for busy people that will enable them to home in quickly on the latest news of interest to them. There may be dozens of (highly-technical) nanotechnology-related papers published each week in the various subscription-only academic journals. We do not attempt to comprehensively review these, looking instead for freely-available, not-too-technical reviews that will be accessible to the bulk of our readers. The more technical reader can always follow through to the original publication. We will make exceptions to this rule at times, where an article or an issue of a journal warrants, and hope to extend this service in the future.

Our brief commentary on links is intended to help the reader’s selection process (once they have come to trust our judgement). We hope it will also raise the occasional smile or two, and that you come to look forward to receiving our newsletter as not just a source of information but as an enjoyable read.

——————————————————————————————–

KEEPING MOORE’S LAW ALIVE

Berkeley Labs’ Science Beat brings us a report (http://enews.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/maskless-chips.html) of a project at that institution to develop commercially-applicable nanolithographic techniques using ion beams. Certainly the ability to dispense with the masks, resists and etching used with prevailing lithographic techniques seems appealing.

For the broader picture on miniaturisation in semiconductor technology using more traditional techniques, see the rather ponderous article in EETimes on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (http://www.eetimes.com/story/technology/OEG20001222S0013), or, also from EETimes (http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010105S0023), a comparison of progress in ultraviolet and electron beam lithographic approaches, that also includes some skepticism about the potential of maskless techniques.

Better, though, and covering the areas of both the EETimes links and more, is a fine article from Red Herring (http://www.redherring.com/insider/2000/1220/tech-mag-88-litho122000.html). This article has broad coverage, clear non-technical explanations of difficult issues and injects some humour too. It stops short of looking into the more exotic possibilities for going beyond the limits of lithographic techniques, e.g. using nanowires (as mentioned below), nanotubes (such as in the latest edition of Science; abstract at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/291/5501/97), or self-assembling molecular electronics (also mentioned below), but that would be a whole new article. Red Herring at its best.

Beyond lithographic techniques, there may be nanowires. The Financial Times briefly reports on a letter in the current issue of Nature on the assembly of doped nanowires into a variety of basic electronic elements (http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=010104001278). Several other recent papers on the production and manipulation of nanowires have pointed to the advantages of such over carbon nanotubes for basic nanoelectronics (but nanotubes have other interesting properties, such as high tensile strength or the ability to act as rheostats when rotated, that offer other possibilities). The summary of the letter in Nature is at http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v409/n6816/abs/409066a0_fs.html&filetype=&_UserReference=C0A804EE46B40E658A9C06C0A0653A57DC36.

A STEAK IN THE FUTURE?

The UK’s Guardian newspaper brings us a year-end look at the future of nanotechnology (courtesy of the Financial Times site – http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=001231000969) that offers just a few possibilities and ends with some of the wilder predictions of the potential of self-replicating nanomachines, this time not the dreaded grey goo but the even more implausible vision of nanobots picking vegetable matter apart atom by atom and rebuilding it into juicy steaks. Harrumph.

Part of the same Guardian ‘Science 2001′ special section is an article (http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=001231000968) that hardly mentions nanotechnology (and badly when it does) but we felt worth including because it’s tremendous fun, and because it does cover well the other of the great fears of Sun co-founder Bill Joy (nanotechnology being the first), as expressed in his now infamous Wired article. This other fear is hyper-intelligent computers taking over the world, which we actually find far more plausible than nanobot-assembled best brisket.

EVENTS

A two-day event to present Swiss micro- and nanotechnology research to UK companies is announced at http://www.itp.org.uk/swissbiomst/info.htm.

Announcement of a prestigious-looking event, The Mitsubishi International Fullerene Workshop 2001, can be found at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010104/az_fic.html.

LOOKING BACK AT Y2K

One we missed last week (no-one’s perfect), a review of 2000 in Chemical and Engineering News online (http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/7851/7851sci1.html). This sumptuous piece, with some nice pics (unfortunately not synchronised with the text in this web version), contains many items touching on the nanoworld. On the self-assembly front, check out the bit in the ‘Materials’ section on membranes containing actin (one of the two proteins that makes up the ratchet mechanism behind muscle contraction) and in the ‘Molecular Electronics’ section, on self-assembling microelectronic systems. There is also a ‘Nanomaterials’ section, predominantly on nanotubes, and a ‘Chemistry-physics Interface’ section that includes one of many uses of silicon cantilevers that have appeared in the last year. Rich pickings.

TROUBLES OUT EAST

The Yomiuri Shimbun/Daily Yomiuri seems fond of making recommendations on science and technology in Japan, and their article on the Kansai region’s declining economy (at the Financial Times site – http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=010104001721) is no exception. The region is home to prominent nanotechnology research groups.

Tagged with:
 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Control Over Materials Is The Real Technology Revolution

On January 5, 2010, in Europe, Nanotech, by Tim

The Evolution Of Control

Here’s a slide that anyone who has seen one of my presentations recently will be familiar with – illustrating the shift we are undergoing from using things that we find to producing the things that we need, something beautifully illustrated by the recent slough of news items about the ‘invention” of artificial arteries using nanotechnology.

Professor George Hamilton from the Royal Free Hospital in North-West London said, “The new graft pulses rhythmically to match the beat of the heart. The graft material is strong, flexible, resistant to blood clotting and doesn’t break down, which is a major breakthrough.”

The real breakthrough of course, is that we have been able to create something that works as well as the material that nature has been using for arteries!

Ten years ago nanotechnology was thought to be a technology that would enable us to cure all kinds of disease by creating tiny robots, or replacing natures creations with our own. In fact a great deal of time and effort went into producing large tomes fantasising about how we could replace our nervous and circulatory systems with various things that may be one day created if the laws of physics and chemistry could somehow be bent in a way that would allow them (as well as warp speed travel, teleportation, holodecks etc – you get the idea).

Fortunately the rest of the scientific community was focused on more practical issues, and the most exciting thing about nanotechnology is it’s ability to give us the precise control over the properties of materials that we have lacked for so long. For the past twenty thousand years we have been using things that we found int he environment, a rock and a stick for example as tools. We got a little more sophisticated when we realised that certain types of rock contained ores of metals, and developed bronze, iron and finally steel tools, but we were still adapting things that we happened to find.

Adding functionality to a bit of PTFE through control over the properties of materials

Synthetic chemistry and polymers moved us a few steps away from depending directly on things we stumbled upon in the natural world, but they have always been crude when compared to the creations of nature – bone is a favourite example of nature coming up with the prefect solution, something that is rigid without being brittle, and self repairing to a large extent.

But where we are heading now is that our combined knowledge of biology, chemistry, and physics is being applied at the nanoscale to create materials and devices that essentially mimic what nature has already created, but with the added element of control.As The Med Guru reports, the artificial artery is far from being just a bit of tubing, and our control over the nanoscale properties of the material, and our ability to reproduce this over larger areas, has enabled to device to have a number of different functions and it these in combination that makes this kind of breakthrough so important.

Study of controlling matter on an atomic and molecular scale coupled with use of nanotechnology enables the spikes to magnetize stem cells or ‘master cells’ from the blood.

“Once the stem cells are attracted to it, they cover the whole inside of it and turn into endothelial cells,” informs Professor Alexander Seifalian

That is the real technology revolution, the ability to specify the properties of an ideal material, and then create it.

Tagged with: • •
 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Got Dem Old European Innovation Blues Again

On December 28, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Europe, VC2.0, by Tim

Lets hope the "innovation economy" works better than the "knowledge economy"

The European Union is getting increasingly interested in innovation, and convened a Business Panel on EU Innovation Policy to help it. The report is here, and  a blogged summary by Diogo Vasconcelos is here.

While it’s all good stuff, and the recommendations about broadening the concept of innovation and creating new infrastructure and financing models are sensible, much of this, and other similar reports tend to ignore the elephant in the room, the question of whether governments can do anything at all abut innovation?

Of course chucking plenty of money around will result in some of it sticking to to something useful, but most of it won’t and of course if huge wads of money are available for innovation then there will be plenty of companies rebranded as innovative that were clean tech the week desperately sticking their paws in the honey pot.

A better suggestion from the Panel is to improve infrastructure, making sure that everyone has access to fast broadband is a step, but one has to wonder whether we are already approaching the stage where everyone who wants superfast broadband internet access already gas it, and piping it into households who have no need or interest in technology will only stimulate innovation in the online gambling and pornography industries.

Rather than building new institutions and putting in soon to be obsolete wiring, Europe should look at what it already has and try to make that more efficient. There s no shortage of decent universities, or of scientific talent. If I were to start throwing taxpayers money around chasing an nebulous concept like innovation, Universities would be a good place to start.

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

UK Government Announces £1Billion Innovation Fund (for the fourth time)

On December 3, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Europe, VC2.0, venture capital, by Tim
UK Announces £1Bn Innovation Fund and Outstanding Achievements at No.3 Tractor Factory in Hartlepool

UK Announces £1Bn Innovation Fund and Outstanding Achievements at No.3 Tractor Factory in Hartlepool

The UK Government’s £1Bn Innovation Fund was announced for the fourth time this week (although I’m still waiting for the promised explanation from Lord Drayson). I wasn’t too impressed last time it was announced, or this time, and Mark Littlewood at Business Leaders Network is also sceptical

It may well be that the money will be raised and will be used to do something imaginative like backing successful angels and entrepreneurs through side-car funds or some similar mechanism. There are some interesting possibilities here that could make sure that the money is spent to ‘kick start British Technology investment’. But putting it into established funds, particularly ones without decent track records, will just create fund managers who are doing it for the management fees, won’t take the kind of risks that are needed and don’t have the experience to make success happen. Oh and it could create a false market.

It might be better if the government could wean itself off the addiction to announcing half baked ideas involving big numbers and actually implement something. It is hard to see the value in constantly re announcing something and the latest news about the fund rings as hollow as a set of Soviet era tractor production statistics.

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Dodgy Statistics and Seasonal Cheer (hic!)

On December 2, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Europe, Finance, Nanotech, Publications, by Tim

It seems to be the season for dodgy statistics as well as good cheer – though perhaps overdoing the good cheer has an impact on the statistics (hic!).

Firstly the UK Governmemt’s £1Bn innovation fund is accused of shaky maths by Richard Tyler in the Telegraph who also questions the wisdom of the Government setting up its own fund rather than giving the private sector tax incentives to do it.

The weirdest statistic comes from the normally excellent UK Trade and Investment who claim that the town of Lowestoft is the ‘Enterprise Capital of Britain’ on the basis of having set up 50,000 new businesses. Given that the town’s population is only 60,000, it’s ether even more impressive or total and utter rubbish (unless of course that the numbers are calculated for businesses set up in ‘Greater Lowestoft’ over the last three millennia).

More serious is dodgy numbers in the business plan I was reviewing earlier for a nanomaterials company. All of the market numbers came from a rather infamous report which predicted nanotech markets in the trillions of dollars with phenomenal growth rates across the board, which led the company to expect fantastic revenues in half a dozen diverse and unrelated market segments. I usually suggest that any business plan which relies entirely on third party market research, and in this case the sunniest and most optimistic research imaginable, goes straight in the bin.

Most of the market research we perform at Cientifica helps validate data acquired elsewhere by our clients, and helps to build an overall picture of the oppotunities and inform discussions about strategy. Clients are sometimes disappointed that our numbers are not as big as other forms would predict, but in a long tern business such as nanotechnology it’s better to spend more time worrying about the accuracy of the numbers than their magnitude.

 
1 Comments
Leave A Response

Page 1 of 1912345678910...Last »
Go To Top »