Strategic Geopolitical Trends – From Spooks to Nanotech

On March 5, 2010, in Economy 2.0, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, Social and Ethical, Sustainability, by Tim

Stop that talk of nanobots, this is getting silly!

The UK Ministry of Defence released its latest ‘Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2040‘ study last month, and it’s a good read (even for non spooks) covering everything from terrorism to to climate change and their impact on geopolitics.

The report identifies four key issues, Globalisation, Climate Change, Global Inequality & Innovation which will dominate the next thirty years. The first three are fairly obvious, but I liked the rather rational approach to innovation which seems to put the military at odds with much of the ‘Cleantech industry.’

Innovation and technology will continue to facilitate change. Energy efficient technologies will become available, although a breakthrough in alternative forms of energy that reduces dependency on hydrocarbons is unlikely. The most significant innovations are likely to involve sensors, electro-optics and materials. Application of nano-technologies, whether through materials or devices, will become pervasive and diverse, particularly in synthetic reproduction, novel power sources, and health care. Improvements in health care, for those who can afford it, are likely to significantly enhance longevity and quality of life.

For those interested in how the military see nanotechnologies, there is a specific mention:

Nanotechnology focuses on manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular scale, generally at less than 100 nanometres in size. At this size, and using other scientific disciplines, the characteristics of matter can be changed. This will create new and unique properties with profound and diverse applications. Advances in nanotechnology, at the interdisciplinary frontier where physics, chemistry and biology meet, will be a key enabler of technological advance, involving: new additives and coatings; materials and sensor development; and medical treatments and heath diagnosis. Products will be smaller and more energy efficient. They will be designed and manufactured with atomic precision and less production waste. Out to 2020, defence applications, in convergence with other disciplines, are likely to be predominantly in sensors, electro-optics and materials, including biologically active agents and surface- engineered materials. Additionally, integrated nano-devices will lead to the emergence of small, swarmed and autonomous systems. The application of nanotechnologies, whether through materials or devices, will become pervasive and diverse, particularly in manufacturing (strong lightweight materials for transportation applications), synthetic reproduction, novel power (battery) sources and health care (targeted drug delivery and augmented medical treatments).

Much of it is sensible, but the term ’synthetic reproduction’ pops up a few times, perhaps a hangover from the old nanobot days when planners envisaged hordes of nanobots devouring enemy tanks?

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The Future Will Be Battery Powered

On May 11, 2009, in Nanotech, Sustainability, US & Canada, by Tim

An interesting battle is brewing over the hydrogen economy with the Obama administration doubting that fuel cells will make much of a difference over the next ten years to be worth funding and describing the decision as a reduction of “less effective programs so we can invest in our economic future.”

Honda, Toyota & General Motors have grumbled bitterly about this as all three have invested heavily in fuel cell research and have a vested interest in the US Government putting up the billions needed to develop a hydrogen infrastructure.

The key problem is hydrogen storage, ever since we found that carbon nanotubes were spectacularly useless as storing hydrogen there just hasn’t been enough convincing progress on this issue. Compare this to what has been happening in batteries where everyone from A123 to Altair have been applying nanomaterials to produce lighter and faster charging batteries and you can understand the DoE shifting its priorities from the clean tech equivalent of nuclear fusion to something a bit more tangible.

If we want a longer term research project, I’d back using synthetic biology to produce a renewable source of petrol. The current proposals to add noises to electric vehicles to stop people sneaking up on blind people and squashing them is as ridiculous as vegetarian bacon when you can have the full throated roar of a V8 instead.

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Cleantech Investors Desperately Seeking The Exit

On April 30, 2009, in Finance, Renewable Energy, VC2.0, venture capital, by Tim

In my predictions over the last year I mentioned that Clean Tech would have a rocky time in 2009 for four reasons

  1. Renewable energy interest tends to lag oil prices by 6-12 months and with oil almost back to 2006 levels a lot of transient interest will evaporate
  2. Lot’s of clean tech companies based their business models on sustained high oil and commodity prices – so a recalculation will reveal that they don’t stand a cats chance in hell of being profitable
  3. The stampede by Venture Capital into every clean tech deal going for the last two years has inflated valuations to levels that will never return any cash to investors – and that was before anyone took into account  recessions & pestilence
  4. As a result, VCs would find themselves locked into very expensive deals and have trouble shaking down their limited partners for the funds necessary to keep in the hunt

Don’t say you weren’t warned. It must be getting serious when even VCs are getting contrite – according to the New York Times:

David J. Prend, managing general partner at RockPort Capital in Boston and Menlo Park, Calif., said that the promise of big returns prompted too much “me-too investing,” when venture capitalists put money into start-ups that do the same work as other companies.

“There was probably some stuff that shouldn’t have been funded,” he said. “It’s kind of good for some of that to get washed out.” For clean tech to be a viable industry, investment should not return to recent highs, he said.

Mr. Vassallo blamed the credit crunch for the decline in clean-tech investing. More than half of clean-tech investments have been in alternative energy like solar and biofuels, which typically require building big factories. These projects depend on capital like project finance loans as well as tax equity investments, whereby corporations back green energy projects and reap the tax credits. These have been “frozen or completely disintegrated,” he said.

This is weird & spooky. Didn’t the same folks say the same thing about dot com investing, about nanotech and now clean tech? Are these the people we see rooted to spot, continually banging their heads against a wall crying “I know there was an exit here somewhere!”

Mark G. Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, prefers to call the clean-tech investment cycle “an education curve.”
Still, he said, “if the industry has gotten one criticism year after year, it’s that we have a lemming mentality, and solar probably represents that in the clean-tech space.”

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Why We Won’t Grow Biofuels in 2029

On April 20, 2009, in Health & Safety, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, by Tim

Biofuels Watch has a little article entitled “Biofuels 20 Years From Now” which caught my eye not so much for its conclusion that we should grow non food crops such as the oily succulent Jatropha instead of maize, but for the woolliness, or at least the linearity of the thinking surrounding biofuels.

There are two things happening here, and neither of them are particularly productive. Firstly there is the underlying assumption that anything bio, i.e natural, must be better than something synthetic like, erm, oil (which is the product of something that did grow once!) which seemed plausible enough to convince politicians around the world to set targets for biofuel use. Of course it has finally dawned that oil can be pumped out of the ground in inhospitable areas if the world whereas the growing of biofuel plants requires the grubbing up of land that would otherwise be used for food production.

What worries me more is the sort of inflexible thinking that this article, and many others addressing future energy needs and sustainability embody. Switching from something edible to something inedible as a feedstock for ethanol production doesn’t solve the problem any more than living in a tree will mitigate climate change.  Growing stuff in fields is something we have been doing for ten thousand years, and it s such an easy trick that even ants can do it, so we need to think about doing something new, something that makes some use of three or four thousand years of civilization, philosophy and science rather than banging our heads repeatedly against the (cave) wall.

If we want to get smart about this, we need to take something that we already have lots of, and find a waste by product that we can utilise, trees for example. Now before anybody jumps up and down pointing out that you can’t make ethanol directory from wood, and all the maple trees in Canada wouldn’t make much difference, we do know that. That’s where the technology comes in.

As often happens with these technologies, you have to get from A to B (or in this case trees to ethanol) via a few other places, and most of those places involve biotechnology and synthetic biology to transform a waste material (and plenty of stuff is thrown away during paper making for example) into a more useful material. Often a second or third step is needed to get to B, but doing this using microbes is much more energy efficient and cleaner than processing biofuels in a refinery.

Get that right and there is no need to take up any additional land, or to plant any additional crops, and you can play this trick with a number of other materials. While some of the technologies I have been looking at (which is why I have to be deliberately sketchy above) are a few years away from commercial use, I’m pretty sure that biofuels in 20 years time will be produced in a far more sensible and efficient way than currently envisaged.

Predictably, Friends of the Earth are dead against this approach, rather short sightedly equating any new technology with unacceptable risk. It’s all very well to carp from the sidelines, but given the urgency of finding solutions to global problems such as water and energy, spending twenty years rejecting any technology based solution doesn’t seem particularly enlightened – even toddlers tantrums blow over quicker!

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Time For A New Green Agenda?

On April 19, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Health & Safety, Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Yesterday’s meeting started me thinking about why, despite some NGO finding another potential climate related catastrophe almost every day, there is a feeling of frustration and a lack of progress. It looks to be the fault of the Green movement itself.

If we take a look at the history of the environmental movement, most if it sprang from the anti establishment movement of the early seventies, when people were fighting against corporate greed and government inaction. This was inexorably linked with left of centre politics, and into this rainbow coalition were drawn all of the other popular movements demanding an end to war, liberation for Palestine, legalisation of LSD and a whole variety of other causes. As a result, it is hard to get any rational discussion of environmental issues without running into some rather naive anti capitalist rhetoric, and this probabl;y goes some way to explaining the Green movements confrontational stance. In a nutshell, they are a bunch of old hippies, still fighting the battles of 1975 in 2009 because a) that is all they know how to do and b) there is a natural human instinct to try to preserve the status quo even if you started off fighting to overturn it.

If we look at the green leaders we see people such as Lord Jonathon Porrit and George Monbiot, sitting pontificating about how people should live their lives from a position of unimaginable privilege when viewed from most of the developing world. I have been in plenty of meetings with this strata of the green movement where people have had the arrogance to try to deny developing nations the very technology which would allow them to start improving standards of living. “We’d rather let them starve than risk using GMOs” seems to be the rather depressing view, which completely missed the point that while we in the west are rich enough to waffle on about downshifting, and slacking for the several billion other people living in grinding poverty would result in an early death.

Let’s face it, cycling to work or trading tomatoes for lettuces with your neighbour might make you feel better, but  isn’t going to save the world, so what is?

Well it has to start with economic growth. Population will continue to rise anyway, and contrasting the living standards in London and Lagos illustrates why money is important. So demanding that x% of GDP be spent on mitigating climate changes isn’t really going to work because that money is being raised through green taxes which just takes more money out of the economy and leaves less of a margin to do good works with. But stimulating economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean pollution, as I mentioned yesterday the environment in the UK is actually getting cleaner and greener while at the same time we have got considerably richer.

It seems that the established Green movement knows only how to use the stick – taxes and scare stories – and not the carrot to change peoples behaviour. Nudge by Richard Thaler would be a good place to start looking for ideas. In addition this obsession with technology being bad is really holding back progress. technology isn’t all bad, as you’ll find out if you ever need to go into hospital.

The other thing that we can do to make a real difference is to encourage the development of, and if safe, the deployment of the whole range of new and emerging technologies that can address climate change. Should we be bothered that an entrepreneur or a company that comes up with a way to make a major difference to carbon dioxide emissions gets rich on the back of it? Of course not, we should applaud it and hope that it it will encourage others to try. There are a huge range of technologies, from nanotechnologies in thin film solar cells, through to engineering carbon capturing microbes using synthetic biology to solar shaded and geoengineering that we need to develop.

Groups such as Friends of the Earth and ETC have fought tooth and claw, and in the dirtiest possible way to encourage the wholesale rejection of technologies. It’s these old hippies with their 1975 mindsets that need to be rejected, not technology. Let’s forget the politics and see some action. If their approach is not appropriate for the 21st century then wither replace them or start a movement that is.

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Oops, I Just Went Green!

On April 18, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, VC2.0, by Tim

Green Futures

I spent a rather enlightening afternoon today at the UK Aware Ideas for Greener Living exhibition speaking on a panel hosted by Francis Sealy of 21st Century Network (@21stCN).

Francis had selected a panel consisting of a technology expert (myself) and a couple of people who were interested in living a more simple life. One of these, a chap called Duncan who had come all the way from Brixton on a recumbent bicycle was an expert on transition towns – listeners to The Archers will know about that idea – while Tracey Smith is the person behind International Downshifting Week and is full of bright ideas for things to do that don’t involve going out and spending money (staying at home and cooking naked pizzas seems to be the new going out).

Looking at the panel, and the exhibition as well, I detected two distinct strands emerging. One is the down shifting/simplicity type movement which involved sewing your own clothes out of bits of rag (I’ve seen people do this in the slums of Howrah as well) and living a simple life after the manner of a 17th century Hebridean crofter. The other solution seemed to involve shoving batteries in things, card, bucycles etc, or making things including, intriguingly, a bicycle  made out of compressed waste paper. So we have simplicity versus technology in a rather crude home made sort of way. Both have their attractions too – a lot of basic skills such as cooking or mending clothes have been lost to the current generation, so I can understand the thrill of discovering that you can do things for yourself. On the other hand driving a plastic battery powered car might make you feel good, but the bill for the new battery after five years and the life cycle carbon emissions will probably make you feel a but queasy.

The Brixton Transition Town project is based on building a local community with its own currency, independent of greedy/misguided central banks, and based on the premise that everything can be done locally. I can see how this would work in rural areas where you have plenty of agricultural produce to barter, and it worked pretty well in the iron age, but London is a big place and the only things you can raise here are pigeons and rats, and I don’t care how sustainable they are, I’m not eating those. A new Brixton Fruit & Nut (and two tomotoes) map may help broaden the diet, but I don;t think Tesco will be too worried. While I applaud the idea behind it, it is at best a very small scale project which not everyone will opt into, perhaps a kind of 21st century collective urban farm? I hope I’m proved wrong.

What shocked me the most was the views of my co panellists. I’ll spare the blushes, but after both had talked about the power of doing positive things for the benefit of the planet/humanity one of them said “The economic crisis is great – it will force people to change” while the other gleefully cried “Peak Oil and the Credit Crunch – Bring It On!!!!”  Come on, is it worth the misery and social deprivation, the homes reposessed, the families split up and the spike in violent crime caused by a recession just to set up a sustainable vegetable trading scheme in Brixton? And they called Margaret Thatcher heartless…

But the point that, hopefully I managed to make was that technology and living in harmony with the planet don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Technology has produced almost all the economic growth of the last three hundred years, and in answer to a question about why we need growth I suggested we contrast quality of life in London and Lagos. Given that everyone is aware of the green/sustainability/carbon/fossil fuel dependence agenda now, many businesses are seeing this as positive thing rather than a millstone, and there is a wonderful opportunity to use technology to make the world better – LED lighting, one of the things on display is a classic case of something where technology can make a huge difference at a low cost. I have a lot of LED lighting at home, it’s better than the dim low energy bulbs, and when mixed with halogen lighting it is possible to fiund an acceptable colour balance.

From the audience, if not from the panel, I took home a sense of frustration with the slow progress being made to reduce emission and tackle environmental issues. Pondering this as I walked across Hyde Park on my way home, a flock of geese flew low overhead, heading for the Serpentine, and I realise that we have already made a lot of progress. The Yorkshire I grew up in was one of black grime caked buildings, belching mills and slag heaps from the mines, it looked like Mordor in the Lord of the Rings movies. Most of our rivers were dead and filled with a chemical sludge and the only bird you ever saw in Bradford were starlings and the seagulls who lived on the rubbish tips. While there are bits of China that still look like that, the rate at which China is adopting clean technologies means that their industrial revolution will blight the landscape for a fraction of the time we had to put up with in the UK.So I suppose we are moving in the right direction already, we just need to pick up the pace.

Looking at the sustainable products in the exhibition, most of them seemed to both more expensive than the non eco versions you can buy and perform rather badly. My instinct is that by using technology rather than rejecting it, we should be able to produce some quite incredible products at a very low cost to both the environment and the consumer. Perhaps the real reason that the whole green economy isn’t quite working is that most of the products seem to have been designed by teepee dwellers with as much idea about economics as Gordon Brown? Swapping organic rats for Tibetan prayer beads won’t change the world no matter what that old hippy tells you.

But in the end, I think I’m a convert to the green cause. Not because of  people who think that riding around on a funny bicycle for the rest of your life and eating roadside weeds will save the planet, because compared to a couple of new power stations in China it won’t make any difference at all. What did it for me was realising that the vast majority of perfectly normal people at this event just want to ensure a nice future for their children, who are worried about running out of resources with no alternatives in sight, and who are less interested in smashing the global financial system than having a system that ensures some kind of sustainable and prosperous future.

An almost final question from the audience was “what would you do in the next twenty four hours to make a difference?” I think I’ve just done it, so let’s pick up the pace!

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Save the Planet – Shoot Yourself

On February 3, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Nanotech, Publications, Renewable Energy, education, by Tim
Saving 10 tons of CO2/year

Saving 10 tons of CO2/year

I’m not sure whether the credit crunch has brought on about of pre apocalyptic fever  or whether living a a world of instant gratification has resulted in attempting anything on a timescale of more than a few weeks has people wailing & gnashing their teeth in jaw snapping frustration. Whatever the cause, environmental issues seem to be resulting in a lot of people foaming at the mouth, stripping off their clothes and running around in the snow barking at car drivers, advocating compulsory sterilization or writing bizarre articles.

Ottilia Saxl takes time off from kicking the backsides of whoever recently besmirched the good name of the Institute of Nanotechnology to be absolutely furious at global governments for “failing the stop use of fossil fuels, failing to limit population growth, failing to protect the rainforest…” and gives a ragbag of reasons why nanotechnology is a vital part of any solution. In fact the new issue of Nano Magazine is packed with articles about how nanotech could help save the planet, and therein lies the problem.

Most of these kind of articles spend 50% of their length regurgitating well known facts about population growth, energy usage and infant mortality, working themselves up into a frenzy of moral indignation, only to let the reader down with the news that researchers somewhere have come up with an idea that may have the possibility to address some problem or other at some point in the future.

I always find this kind of article rather lazy and ultimately disappointing, after all it’s just a matter of cutting and pasting two groups of facts and finding some justification to link them.

So, if you really want to save the planet, stop wasting time and energy by writing pointless articles based on flimsy evidence. Charity starts at home, but saving the environment starts in the governments of India, China and the USA. There are also a number of other ways to make a difference

  1. Breathe less. An average persons respiration generates some 900g of carbon dioxide a day, so by breathing less, or avoiding getting steamed up over global warming issues you could make a real difference immediately.
  2. Shoot yourself. My thanks to Jonathan Porrit for pointing out that doing something about population could help stop climate change, even if he can’t do the demographic maths too well. Of course the quickest way to make a difference would be to shoot yourself. Ending your life 40 years ahead of schedule would save over 400 tons of carbon dioxide, and this could be easily increased by bumping off a few other people too.

Disclaimer: As science education and common sense seem to be in short supply when ‘climate change’ is concerned,  I should point out that I am not suggesting that anyone actually follows either of the techniques above, or wastes any time working out the amount of  carbon dioxide saved by genocidal megalomaniacs in the 20th century.

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The First and Last Nanotech Conference

On January 20, 2009, in Events, Nanotech, US & Canada, credit crunched, by Tim

Usually I get a flurry of emails inviting me to IBF’s Nanotechnology Investing Forum in Palm Springs in February, but this year the wire was silent. Perhaps, I thought,  because of the talk I gave last year which didn’t go down too well with the assembled nanotech VCs. I was at the first one in 2002 and now it appears the last one in 2008. What began as a two day conference has now become a two hour workshop tacked onto a Clean Tech investing conference.

Anyway, with the current problems besetting the VC industry, I thought it prurient to dig out the article I wrote for an investment publication last February. Perhaps the reason that the VCs were so enraged (one well known figure even refused to return my greeting) was that a lot of them were indeed living in cloud cuckoo land.

Six years ago I gave a keynote speech at the first IBF Nanotechnology Investing Forum in Palm Springs in which I gave my vision for the future of nanotechnology. My message was simple, “there is not, and there never will be a nanotechnology industry.” This was very bad news for all of the people who had staked their career and/or a few million dollars on profiting from the next industrial revolution and there was quite a debate about whether that view was rational or cynical.

In early February I attended the 7th annual NIF, which had shifted a few miles east to Indian Wells to see what had changed. Over dinner the night before the conference I was told by a couple of people not to say anything bad about the state of the nanotech industry “it’s hanging by a thread right now” was one remark that was repeated a few times. The mood in the conference wasn’t much better, with a lot of people putting a brave face on things, while glossing over the fact that there has been no appreciable increase in value of companies that they have been holding positions in for six to eight years. One VC told me that all sub $250m stocks were down and this was just the way the market is, but this is rather disingenuous as, while there has been a trend in that direction over the last few months, my data covered the last few years!

My feeling is the problem isn’t the companies, but the VC model. A look at the history of technology diffusion tells us that it takes seven to ten years from research to mass market applications, and that is a tie scale that doesn’t work for VCs. Most of them have a fund with a limited lifetime, typically seven years, which means that all the companies that were presented at the conference at 2002 will be straining at the end of their tether.  Most VCs, and almost all of the lower tier funds with less than a hundred million under management, couldn’t care less whether the company turns a long term profit or not. The over riding concern is for their career and reputation and this can lead to disastrous consequences. In the struggle to return cash to their limited partners some VCs will do anything to realise some value, whether selling it out from under the feet of the founders or breaking it up into anything that makes a buck.  The fact that the elusive market might be happening next year, or the year after is of little concern.

This is compounded by the desire to ‘own’ a particular technology, which leads VCs to stampede in the direction of nanotech, and more recently clean tech (by the way – has anybody ever heard a consistent definition of what “clean tech’ is?). With any emerging technology, once you have persuaded investors to provide you with funds you have to spend them. What we saw with nanotech, and more recently with clean tech is too much capital chasing too few good deals, and the result of that is always that the good deals are over valued, and those VCs who don’t manage to get into the good deals have to fund deals that a more rational investor would turn down.

So, six years on we had the usual show of bravado, but my challenge to show me a successful VC funded “nanotech” company went sadly unmet.

So what was good about the conference? Well I personally enjoyed the talk by Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.  Steve made his name by funding Hotmail, which was quickly sold to Microsoft, and Skype, which was acquired by eBay, but has also been an active proponent of nanotech.

A lot of the early DFJ nanotech investments have turned out to be science projects, a typical example being Zettacore whose intention was to replace CMOS devices with molecular memory.
The idea behind most attempts at molecular memory is to utilise a molecule which can be flipped between two or more states rather than having a standard silicon memory element. By self-assembling these molecules on a substrate, it is theoretically possible to create far denser memory than is possible with CMOS, although since 2001 the semiconductor industry has decreased feature size by a factor of three, steadily eroding any advantage that Zettacore may have had.

A look at Zettcore’s web site gives an indication of how well they are doing, with practically no news of note since 2004, and this is typical of many of the pure play nanotech companies. While the technology may work fine in the lab, scaling it up and integrating it with existing semiconductor technology has proved to be much harder than anyone ever imagined. In fact the Semiconductor Industry Association’s own roadmap published in 2001 does not see molecular memory being developed before 2010, although it does predict the use of quantum cellular automata buy 2008!

With a few billion in profits, DFJ can afford to take a chance on emerging technology, and Steve’s homily to the emerging field of synthetic biology was just as awe struck and starry eyed as when in 2002 he was talking about nanotechnology resulting in the “digitisation of matter.” My feeling is that while the area has massive potential, it will also take years to yield any returns.

So, after six years we are older, but it seems that many of the VCs are not much wiser, still trying to kick start a business model that only briefly spluttered into life during the dot com era. If I were to take a longer term bet on the types of vehicles that might turn a loner term profit, I would take a look at Arrowhead Research and Harris and Harris. While both are publicly traded, they can afford to take a loner term view of technology than their VC counterparts.
Perhaps that is the most important lesson of the last six years – things always take longer than anyone expects, and that to invest in early stage emerging technologies you need to take a long term, ten to fifteen year view.

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Credit Crunch or Creative Destruction

On January 5, 2009, in Finance, Health & Safety, Nanotech, Products, Publications, Social and Ethical, US & Canada, Unmitigated Hype, by Tim
Creative Destruction - Hindu Style

Creative Destruction - Hindu Style

In October 2008, I was asked at the World Economic Forum along with other experts to address the main challenges facing nanotechnology. While environmental, health and safety concerns had been the preoccupation of many for 2008, this question posed by the WEF combined with the world economic crisis led me to consider the challenges of funding and commercializing of nanotechnology and other emerging technologies for 2009.
We can expect to hear much more of Joseph Schumpeter’s ideas of Creative Destruction  this year as the world comes to terms with the credit crunch, or recession as these events used to be known.  While the depths of a recession can be the best time to start a business, Microsoft is an oft cited example, this is scant consolation for the tens of thousands of companies that will not survive, and the millions who will lose their jobs as a result. An alternative scenario is Nietzsche’s earlier Shiva inspired version of creative destruction, with the new morality standing in the ruins of the old, which may be the long terms fate of a number of financial institutions and economies.

As a result, we published a note today looking at the five most significant issues which we see impacting the world of nanotechnologies in the coming year.

Feel free to disagree on the blog or contact us for more specific information.

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