Good question!
Technology Review, besides being a great magazine edited by Jason Pontin, who I have known since the heyday of Red Herring, also puts on some great conferences. So I was excited and honoured to be invited to EmTech Spain, a two day conference in Malaga focussing on emerging technologies.
Along with my World Economic Forum colleague Javier García Martínez of Rive Technology and the University of Alicante, we were discussing what nanotechnology is, how to build a business out of it, and where it will take us.
Normally at these kind of conferences, discussing everything from the future of cities to social media, nanotech is one of the most futuristic and least understood technologies on the agenda – making me feel like a cuckoo in the nest when most peoples idea of emerging technology is something that they can have on their iPhone next week. However the “imagine a world where…” speech was given by Richard Kivel this time, discussing regenerative medicine, while Javier and I discussed existing and future applications of nanotechnologies.
So what use is nanotechnology? Simple, I think is makes a key contribution to addressing issues such as energy and health, allowing us to support today’s 7 billion and tomorrow’s 10 billion people in an increasingly sustainable manner. You can read my thoughts in the original Spanish, or as a rougher and less polished Q&A in English below.
1. If we make a more efficient use of resources (energy, agriculture, water) through technology, could a growing population (eg, India or China) join the living and consumption standards of the developed world?I’m an optimist about technology, after all it has got us this far, supporting another billion people every 12-14 years which would have been unimaginable only a hundred years ago. New technologies certainly help us make better use of resources but we have to remember that many of those resources – fossil fuels, minerals – are finite and their use does come at an environmental and social cost. If the plan was to continue with the same age old patterns of consumption, take-make-waste, then the answer to this question would have to be no. But in step with new technologies we are moving towards new patterns of consumption, with the energy balance shifting away from fossil fuels to renewables such as solar harvesting and biomass. So life in the 21st Century for China and India won’t all be Cadillac Eldorados, as social and economic pressures shift us into new modes of consumption. What I do think we will see is more sustainability, whether in energy or food, and new technologies being used to proactively prevent disease and pestilence – as we have already seen from genetically engineered plants to point of care medical diagnostics – rather than simply cleaning up the mess.
2. This increase of efficiency due to the use of technology, must run in parallel with a reduction in consumption?Although we think technology moves fast – not many people predicted the iPhone or Facebook – the big leaps forward, the ones that are really transformative take 15-30 years. The internet didn’t just appear in 2000, it was the combination of a range of different technologies maturing over the previous 30 years that made it usable, accessible and transformative. So we have to reduce consumption in the short term while we wait for the long term benefits of technology to kick in.
3. One of the main Cientifica´s aims is to ”set up and design technology and commercialization programs for governments around the world”. In which projects is involved and which challenges is facing now?In the last ten years we’ve advised everyone from Europe and the US to a number of Gulf and African states. The challenge is always the same, how to make the best use of your resources to get an economic impact. The most successful nanotechnology programs, for example, are in countries such as the US, Japan and Germany where industry is hungry for new technologies to maintain global competitiveness. But the research has to be appropriate, there is no point in setting up a centre focussed on semiconductors if the benefits of that research will end up in Singapore or San Jose.
4. What are the main differences between a nanotechnology program designed for Spain and one designed for South Africa, EEUU or China?In some respects Asian programs are easier to design because there is more likely to be a long term vision of where the economy should be in 5, 10 or 20 years. In the rest of the world politician have to be convinced to continue programs every few years so it is important to be able to show results. I’m always an advocate of giving the funding to small innovative companies, the ones with high growth potential which will have the biggest economic effect in terms of jobs and tax revenues, but many agencies prefer a conservative approach, giving cash to large established industries which although reducing the chance of failure, also reduces the potential economic benefits.
5. One of Cientifica´s key ideas is that success in business depends not only on innovation but also in putting together technology and a global trend. Will nanotechnology be a standing out technology platform compared to others? Could you cite another three examples of technologies that would play an important role in the future?Catching a trend is a must for any innovation based business. It can be a a technology trend such as Apple managed with mp3 audio, or a social trend such as Facebook, but having the right product at the right time is the most important factor in success. But nanotechnology is no more a platform than chemistry or physics – it’s the application of the technology that matters, and that often involves intersecting with other areas of emerging technology.Choosing three technologies out of all of those enabled by nanotechnologies is hard, but let’s start with organic, or plastic electronics, medical diagnostics and instrumentation.Organic electronics means we print electronics, using inks containing nano particles which make them conducting or semiconducting, with a modified inkjet printer. So the cost of a printed electronics fab is around 10% of the cost of a silicon fab, and energy use is cut by 90% too. But don;t expect organic electronics to start competing with silicon. The CMOS technology developed over the past 50 years is very advanced and more importantly well characterised. What this means is that we can design a process t make a chip, and everything, from the yield of working devices to the input costs will behave pretty much as we expect. By contrast organic electronics in its infancy. It wont be able to make super fast processors like CMOS, but it has the advantage of being very very cheap, so when we talk about ubiquitous electronics or the ‘internet of things’ then a lot of those ‘things’ will be printed.Medical diagnostics is another area that is ‘on trend.’ The use of all kinds of nanosensors, from quantum dots through carbon nanotubes to printed detectors addresses the problem of ageing populations and rising healthcare costs. Early diagnosis saves a huge amount of cost for health services and medical insurance companies. Combine this with genotyping to see what diseases you may be susceptible to, and also which treatments will work best and the balance of healthcare can shift from intervention to prevention.Given my background in analytical instruments, I’d also have to add scientific instruments as a key enabler. Better instrumentation has enabled us to really start understanding how a lot of biological processes work, from the bottom up, and the more we understand about nature the easier it is to try to copy a few of those tricks.
6. More and more knowledge is being generated thank to computing and science interaction, but that growth is not proportional to the available capital to turn this ideas into products. Where can we find ways to finance early stage technology business, especially those that need a big inversion like cleantech/biotech start-ups?This is the problems of the technology overhang. When we look at the worlds major problems we may already have a number of the technologies we need to start addressing them proactively, but unless we can find the right mechanisms to turn scientific innovation into usable technology then we will have wasted our effort. The innovation process is much more inefficient than most people imagine, relying on someone spotting the potential of a bit of science, that potential somehow being funded and then the resulting company having the right people with the right skills and the right timing to get it to market. Venture capital isn’t too much help. Why bother with hard to understand, risky, expensive and long term stuff like nanotechnology when it only takes a couple of guys with a few laptops to create the next Facebook – and you’ll know whether it will work in 18 months rather than 5 years.One of our projects which arose from work we have done with the World Economic Forum, is the creation of a Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence which will look at the longer term issues and attempt to find ways to make the innovation process more efficient. It;s clear that we can;t just wait for a disater to happen and then expect to pluck the technological solution from a tree, we have to be much more proactive. But in doing this we have to also find the win-win-win situation for technology, business and society. While some emerging technologies may result in clear economic benefits for the developers, this is only a subset of the technologies available. In many cases the creation of shared public-private responsibility for their development may be the catalyst that unlocks the full potential of the technologies.The new model is built on the premise that up-front investment in resources, knowledge and people will lead to a significant reduction in future liabilities. Its success depends therefore on a commitment to invest in technology innovation in new ways. This does not necessarily mean new financial investment, although in some cases this may be warranted. Rather, it implies strategic investment in research, in knowledge translation, in networks, in systems and in people, which increases the likelihood of technology innovation supporting long-term social and economic development.
7. In which emerging technology would you recommend to invest in the coming years? Which countries and institutions will be the main investors?I particularly like the area where life sciences, nanotechnology and information technologies are combining. Areas such as synthetic biology and regenerative medicine are already demonstrating their own versions of Moore’s law, and the development of cheap point of care diagnostics addresses so many economic and societal issues, while also circumventing major headaches such as privacy and data security concerns.
8. In terms of climate change and sustainability, carbon productivity will be a major concern for the industry. Is a priority to invest economic resources in developing CCS technologies or would be better to spend them in installing renewable energies that do not emit CO2?
I think we need to be a bit more ambitious in our outlook. Solar and wind energy are fine, but they don’t really address the cause of the problem, or come up with any kind of integrated or sustainable solution. If we are serious about climate change, and we should be, then we need bold ambitious and global projects to address it, making use of the widest possible range of technologies. Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow the CO2 already in the atmosphere will cause major effects for the next hundred millennia, so sticking a solar panel on your roof and cycling to work makes hardly any difference. Of course we need both CSS and renewables in the short term, but we need to look kore than ten years ahead.9. If we already have the technology to address global problems such as water shortages and disease… What are the real reasons of not being using it now? Who owns this kind of technologies and how are they like?In many cases the reason is economic, the people most affected by water shortages and disease are those least able to pay. Our model for CETI puts a lot of emphasis on social in addition to financial entrepreneurship. Successful partnerships have already demonstrated the power of this approach, such as the Gates Foundation support of new metabolic routes to the production of the anti-malarial drug artemicinin – the technology platform allows the producer to develop other more economically viable drugs while making the anti malarial drugs available at low cost.
10. Will solar energy be able to provide energy security if a rise of efficiency is achieved due to nanotechnology breakthroughs? When do you estimate that we would reach that security status?Solar will only ever be a part of the energy solution. We also have to look at storage and transmission in order to produce a workable solution. Billions have already gone into organic photovoltaics – the development of cheap plastic solar cells – and I’m confident that the current issues of efficiency and lifetime can be overcome. But its not the only solution, for example the planet creates 170 billion tones of biomass a year, of which we utilise around 7 billion tons, another massively under-used resource which could enable biotech based solutions such as bioreactors to play an important part in energy security. However, this creates another problem for Europe in that we cannot produce all the biomass we need for energy generation, so if we are not dependent on hydrocarbons from the middle east and Russia , we may be equally dependent on biomass imported from Africa!
While working on our report on Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks, one of my favourite SciFi authors, Neal Stephenson, popped up with an essay on Innovation Starvation.
It echoes Tyler Cowen‘s arguments that all the easy big stuff has been done, and that all we have left to look forward to are incremental improvements rather than world changing technologies.
Stephenson, being a science fiction writer, looks at space as an example where a culture of risk avoidance, cost cutting and politics combine to stifle innovation. As he points out, even China’s space program is merely copying what the USA and Soviet Union were doing 50 years ago rather than doing anything innovative.
It is undoubtedly a problem that plagues the world. Whether it is large ambitious space programs, or providing a government stimulus for technology companies, the emphasis is always on avoiding failure, which involves avoiding anything innovative. The million lost by a failed company always generates more headlines for governments than the hundred million successfully leveraged as we can see with the furore over Solyndra – although governments have a poor track record of picking winners.
So how can we kick start global innovation? As I argue in Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks we need to focus on the big issues that we can all agree on. Water might be a good start.
Over the past five years I have come across numerous innovative approaches to water scarcity, from desalination plants that double as greenhouses to nanostructured membranes that dramatically cut the energy needed for desalination, but I cant remember a single one of them attracting significant investment. That wasn’t because the technology is poor, it is simply because of the costs involved in getting it to market put it outside the risk which any early stage investor would be comfortable with. Raising $50 million for social networking is relatively simple, but for water remediation it is a stretch too far. Development times in excess of 3 years and uncertainty about who will pay for the technology combine to make it almost unfundable.
For a small fraction of the current cost of dealing with drought – something that will only increase in the future – we could develop a suite of technologies to mitigate the shortage of potable water. But we won’t.
I’m not convinced by the innovation starvation argument, I think we have plenty of innovation but we lack the political will to deploy them. The challenge isn’t so much stimulating innovation as effectively making the case for governments and international institutions to use it.
(Foreword to Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks , October 2011)
This is a question that often comes up in our dealings with global policy makers who spend huge sums on scientific research while simultaneously being fearful of its consequences. Many believe that it is somehow important for the economy in an undefined and non-quantifiable manner, or that it is some kind of logical next step along the path that starts with scientific curiosity. Perhaps a better way of viewing technology would be as a mechanism through which science is applied to meet the needs of society, and that holds true whether the needs of society are getting rich quick, curing cancer, or both.
But there is another less beneficial view of technology. The idea that technology is responsible for environmental degradation, especially when coupled with population growth, is a powerful one that has held true since the industrial revolution. It is human nature to fondly imagine an agrarian pre-industrial utopia, while forgetting the regular plagues and famines that resulted in an average life expectancy of 35 years in pre-industrial Britain. The idea that technology is a bad thing is a situation that has existed for much of the 20th century and persists into the 21st, partly as a result of confusion between technology itself and those individuals and corporations who control and exploit it.
But it is time for a change. In fact a change is inevitable. Human history is littered with technological advances that have changed everything, and much faster than anyone could have imagined. The agricultural, industrial and information revolutions have resulted in massive changes to the economy, society and the way in which we interact with the environment.
Since the second world war, science and technology have moved faster and had a more profound impact on human society than at any other point in human history. We have moved from black and white television exploding onto the market in the early 1950s to more than 800 million people using Facebook within 60 years. While television took 3 decades to diffuse around the world, Facebook did it in 3 years. Technology has driven economic growth around the world and led to vast improvements in the quality of life for much of the global population, but it has come at a price: the rise of consumerism has resulted in environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale.
It is time to reappraise our relationship with technology and take control of its direction. With an increasing global population becoming ever more affluent, the pressure on resources coupled with climate change will inevitably lead to more wars, water shortages, famines and mass migration. Or will it?
If profound economic, societal and environmental changes are inevitable then why do we still address them in the same way we have for millennia, by being helplessly reactive? In the 21st century, science and technology has advanced to a stage where we can start taking control of the fruits of scientific progress rather than being powerless in the face of their development and exploitation.
We already have many of the technologies we need to address major global problems such as water shortages and disease, and there is no reason why inevitable environmental disasters such as oil spills still have to be tackled using antiquated technology when a hundred million dollars could give us the technologies to reduce the impact of oil spills to almost zero. Many other emerging technologies are being developed that would allow the world to support 10 billion people without compromising the tremendous growth in quality of life that has taken place over the last century.
At Cientifica we establish how we can harness technologies for the global good. While we still lack the political will and necessary international institutions, we now have the knowledge and the tools to make the transition from being mere consumers of, and in some respect slaves to technology, to making use of the new scientific revolution to mitigate and minimise global risks.
While it would be foolish to claim that the wise use of science and technology will usher in a utopian age, there is little doubt that we now have the tools to create a sustainable and responsible world where human suffering and environmental degradation can be alleviated while maintaining economic growth.
According to JP Morgan, flying to 21186 miles to Melbourne and back for a clean tech conference generated 5.63 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but unlike most conferences on this subject the hot air emissions were negligible.
The Sir Mark Oliphant Cleantech: Mainstream and at the Edge conference was refreshing for the positive outlook on cleantech rather than the self flagellation that usually goes along with this kind of event. While there were a few graphs showing frightening population statistics, with dire predictions of resource and energy use, they were mostly used to illustrate how a combination of human ingenuity and technology could be used to solve problems. None of the speakers even suggested smashing the corrupt capitalist system as happens so often at green events.
Megatrends
From my perspective, as hopefully a purveyor or at least enabler of technology based sustainability, the advantage of this kind of event is to see what the real drivers are, the market for the technology, and then try to find the science and engineering to solve the problem. This probably explains my rapt attention to talks like Stefan Hajkowicz’s excellent overview of Megatrends (the full report is available here), which looked at the “trends, patterns of economic, social or environmental activity that will change the way people live and the science and technology products they demand.”
I wasn’t too happy about the use of data from a rather flawed WEF risk report which identified nanotechnology as a risk on a par with an asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, oil and gas price spikes, extreme climate change related weather, pandemic, biodiversity loss and terrorism. We seem to keep finding echoes of the grey goo fears of ten years ago in these kind of documents, something for the science communication experts to ponder.
Also fascinating was Ellen Sandell’s talk on her work with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, a mobilisation of 50,000 young people who just couldn’t wait for Copenhagen, Davos or Canberra to reach an agreement, or for the Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace to stop politicking and decided to get things moving themselves.
So given that we know what to expect, and we have no lack of youthful enthusiasm to push us along, there’s no real excuse not to act. We should be demanding of our politicians that we develop new technologies not new taxes, and that we use our scientific knowledge of the natural world to make it a better place.
The news gets even better, as many of the speakers mentioned, in that you can make the world a better place and make money.
No worries!
The Sir Mark Olifant Cleantech conference has been a lot of fun so far, from Eric Isaac’s opening overview of the the issues (and solutions) to Stefan Hajkowicz’s analysis of megatrends that will shape our future technology development.
I’m still struck by how much cleantech seems to be focused in a few rather obvious areas, something which effectively prices a lot of technologies out of the market, and the excessive valuations thus generated tend to make it almost impossible to get a return for most investors. Sometimes meeting the problem head on isn’t the best strategy, and it is better to wait until a problem has been cracked and then capitalise on the myriad opportunities that spin out – as with mobile phones you don’t have to invent the device to make money from it.
My focus is more on how nanotechnology, by its nature is more akin to what nature does. As Eric Isaacs mentioned this morning, we are almost at the stage where we can create materials by design, or in his his words ‘we can almost taste it’ – something that opens up a whole new world of sustainable everything.
A preview of my presentation is available here – with the caveat that it works better if you hear me tell the story behind it!
Twenty Four hours ago my colleague Dexter Johnson asked my opinion about what nanotechnology could do to help clean up the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and I reluctantly said “not much.”
But this doesn’t have to be the answer, we probably have access to most of the technologies that we would need to make a big dent in the environmental mess that is unfolding, but why haven’t they been used?
The answer, as Andrew Maynard and I found out through our work with the World Economic Forum, is that most governments are reactive rather than proactive. The emphasis is on regulating risk rather than developing technologies that would help us deal more effectively with risk, and this disaster illustrates how, when something goes wrong, governments want to be able to pluck fully formed technologies from a tree. Unfortunately the branches are bare.
So what should we be doing to help us deal with inevitable disasters? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but with a bill estimated at $15 billion for this incident alone, shouldn’t we be spending a few hundred million on making sure that we have the right technologies?
Between nanotechnology, industrial biotech and perhaps even synthetic biology, and not forgetting traditional chemistry I’d bet that we already have 90% of the technology we need. Light, strong, resistant materials for plugging leaks and corralling slicks, enzymes to transform oil into something more manageable, and dispersants to break up the slicks.
It is a certainty that somewhere in the world we will have another oil spill. What is less certain that by then we will have developed the technologies to stop an accident becoming a catastrophe.
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?
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.
In my predictions over the last year I mentioned that Clean Tech would have a rocky time in 2009 for four reasons
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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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