Redesigning Technologies For Risk Avoidance With The World Economic Forum

On June 4, 2010, in Development Issues, Economy 2.0, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, Social and Ethical, Sustainability, geoengineering, by Tim

I spent last weekend in a rather hot Doha (Qatar), surrounded by Emirs, Queens, Princes and Prime Ministers at the World Economic Forums Global Redesign Initiative meeting. It’s an organization I have been involved with for the past six years, through both the Technology Pioneers program and the Global Redesign Initiative.

As the world changes at an ever increasing pace, with new challenges from the financial, technology and natural worlds coming thick and fast, there have been questions over whether international institutions, from the United Nationals to the International Monetary Fund are able to cope.

“Today’s institutions are organized to solve yesterday’s problems” – Mark Malloch Brown, World Economic Forum Global Redesign Meeting, Doha, May 2010

A large part of the change, from the time when most institutions were set up in the aftermath of the second word war has been the explosive growth in communication. When the UN was founded television was only available to a very few people, whereas in 2010 almost five billion people have access to the Internet. The proliferation of Internet enabled devices from iPhones to sensors and the expanding use of social networking such as Twitter and Facebook would have been unimaginable even thirty years ago when the Internet was still an emerging technology.

But technology can present a hazard as well as a risk. While presenting many opportunities that benefit the planet such as raising awareness of global issues and encouraging international cooperation, the Internet can also be used for identity theft and spreading pornography, or even challenging the legitimacy and authority of governments.

With all emerging technologies to date, from the Internet to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the understanding of the implications by governments and international institutions has lagged way behind the deployment of the technology.

The same is true for the emerging technologies of the 21st Century. Nanotechnologies, synthetic biology and geoengineering have undoubted potential for good, especially in proactively addressing the issues which will inevitably arise in a world where nine billion people face increasing competition for resources, from food and water to power and natural resources. But equally inevitable is the potential for misuse, from home brew bioterrorism to environmental pollution, and in the case of geoengineering the potential for global disaster even though technologies may have been deployed with the best of intentions.

These emerging technologies, and their inter-linkages with civil society have the potential to shape and reshape our world even more profoundly than the Internet, and the ease of access to information and computing power means that in the 21st century world changing breakthroughs are as likely to come from the mind of student as from a large multinational corporation.

The reactive nature of institutions is inherent in their nature, and we are proposing the creation of a mechanism to support faster, more fact based decision-making, and to provide the knowledge which would enable a proactive approach to be taken to both the risks and the opportunities arising from 21st Century emerging technologies.

The full proposal for the Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence is contained in the WEFs Global Redesign Initiative report, and you can also download a copy here.

I’m happy to say that the idea is receiving increasingly strong support from both Governments and companies who are increasingly realizing that in today’s world, taking a passive and reactive approach to global issues will be always more expensive than developing risk avoidance technologies in advance.

You can see (and hear) more about the WEF Global Redesign Initiative below

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Cleantech in Melbourne: No Worries!

On May 12, 2010, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, by Tim

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!

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We Have The Technologies To Deal With Oil Spills, Why Don’t We Use Them?

On May 4, 2010, in Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

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.

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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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All I Want For Christmas Is A Return On My Investment

On December 7, 2009, in Nanotech, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, credit crunched, geoengineering, by Tim

An early Christmas present? A late Eid or Diwali one? Our latest white paper looks at investing in emerging technologies from a variety of perspectives.

At Cientifica we have been working with emerging technologies for fifteen years, whether developing field emission displays in the mid 90’s, or advising governments, companies and the World Economic Forum in recent years. Over this period money has been made and lost in everything from medical devices to scientific instrumentation and carbon nanotubes, and this hands-on approach has left us with a wealth of practical experience.

As we approach the end of the first decade of a new millennium, science and technology are advancing faster than ever, with a wide range of new and emerging technologies ready to change the world and take investors for a ride.

As a sane and rational voice in a sea of hype, and one of the few companies whose clients have consistently been on the winning team in technology investment, we present a brief guide to making money out of emerging technologies for governments companies and investors.

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Copenhagen – Where’s The Science?

On December 7, 2009, in Nanotech, by Tim
Secretary-General Addresses Climate Change Sum...

Image by United Nations Photo via Flickr

The next couple of weeks will be dominated by the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, and probably some nasty brutish debate with science caught somewhere in the middle. While the negotiators fumble towards a compromise that keeps all the vested interests happy while appearing to be taking tough action, I’ll be busy pushing the idea that we should actually do something about it.

Unfortunately the political response to climate change so far has been simply to set targets and impose taxes. While every politician knows that the only way to reduce energy consumption would be to double prices, as the recent oil price spike showed, that would be political suicide, so the response has been ‘green taxes’, adding a few pence here, a pound on air passenger duty there, that no one will notice too much.

However, merely taxing and punishing people doesn’t provide a solution and the only way to make a difference is to make sure that we are applying the fruits of four thousand years of science and technology more effectively than we do at present. That means governments supporting science with the fruits of the eco taxes, rather than simply shovelling them into the black holes of the banking system, and NGO’s stopping their knee-jerk anti science reactions and working with the scientific community to find acceptable sustainable solutions.

The most important thing to emerge from Copenhagen will not be a new round of targets, but a real commitment to ensure that the technologies we need to tackle climate change (and this involves nanotech, industrial biotech, geoengineering, synthetic biology and a whole range of other technologies that are currently unpalatable to the huge swathers of the ‘stop climate change’ lobby) can be effectively developed and deployed, and pronto!

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From Nanotechnology to Spitalfields Fashion

On October 7, 2009, in Europe, Nanotech, Products, by Tim

foxbatToday’s Times has four writers explaining their ‘Eureka Moments’ with science, and proving that a lifetime in the arts is no barrier to getting to grips with science.

I’ve spent the past couple of months going the other way, and getting involved in fashion! I’ve long been fascinated by the creative arts, but my enthusiasm has been unmatched by my skill with a paintbrush or even a soldering iron, both of which have in the past raised gasps of astonishment. However, I recently found a way to reconcile nanotechnology with fashion by opening a boutique, Foxbat, in one of London’s hippest districts, Spitalfields.

The idea came about last year when the Victoria and Albert Museum organised an exhibition called ‘China Design Now‘ which illustrated how art, design and fashion was undergoing a renaissance in China.

China is huge. China is becoming topical. Yet China remains mystery to most people in the West. ‘Made in China’ has become a familiar tag, but the spectacular creative energy in modern China is barely known. During the last twenty years, the Chinese have rediscovered their pre-socialist past and begun to combine their own traditions with global influences to produce a cultural rebirth. At the heart of this lies a new culture of design.

Spending time in China last year I was struck by the new home grown brands of fashion & jewellery that were emerging to stand alongside the more well known European brands and the ubiquitous (in Asia) Burberry, and the idea was born to import the best of Chinese and Korean design to Europe. The quality is outstanding, and given the disparity between consumer buying power in London and Shanghai, some thing that would cost the equivalent of a thousand pounds in China can be retailed in London for two hundred! So it’s high fashion at high street prices, a credit crunch business model that appealed to me.

We finally opened Foxbat last week, on Brushfield St in Old Spitalfields Market after six months of negotiating leases, dealing with builders, plumbers, electricians, window cleaners. A week before we were due to open our interior designers flounced out in a huff after we criticised their tiny fitting room mirrors, leaving us to source everything ourselves at short notice.

So what about the nanotechnology? We have one of the largest collections of NeoGlory crystal jewellery outside China. NeoGlory also make all the crystals for a well known Austrian brand, but have now moved into producing their own designs, which are equally stunning but at a fraction of the usual prices. As some people may know, the days of mining crystal from the Austrian Alps ended a long time ago, and most crystal used in jewellery is lead crystal, often coated with a few nanometers of metal film to add colour and enhance sparkle.

So moving from nanotechnology to a boutique full of shiny sparkly girly stuff isn’t such a great leap after all!

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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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The Least Informative Information Of The Year?

On April 15, 2009, in Asia, Events, Nanotech, by Tim

Some bizarre statistics about nanotechnology market growth are being bandied around followimg the “Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) along with Department of Science & Technology, (DST), Government of India, Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology (GIST) and Tamil Nadu Technology Development Promotion Council” fourth Nanotechnology Conclave 2009.

This looks like a perfect storm of the longest and most complex conference name (you certainly couldn’t tweet that!) and the least informative piece of information so far in 2009.

The fastest growing segments of the market are scanning probe microscopes, with a CAGR of 19.4% between 2007 and 2012, and charged particle microscopes with a CAGR from 2007 to 2012 of 9.0%. Optical microscopes are projected to have the lowest growth rate of any major market segment (5.6% CAGR). As a result, charged particle microscopes, which have the largest market share of any product segment, are projected to increase their market share further, from 52% in 2006 to 52.1% in 2012. Optical microscopes are projected to lose market share, from 26.2% in 2006 to 21.9% in 2012. In 2006, semiconductor manufacturing was the dominant end-user market for microscopes, with 31% of the total market, followed by life sciences (27%) and materials (24%), and nanotechnology (10%). Nanotechnology and semiconductor manufacturing are the fastest-growing end-user markets with CAGRs of 19.4% and 10.2% respectively.

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The Hype That Came Back to Bite

On April 15, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Nanotech, US & Canada, Unmitigated Hype, by Tim

I received an email from the US NanoBusiness Alliance (yes they are still limping along) appealing for data on jobs created by nanotechnologies, a clear case of the hype that came back to bite.

We Need Your Jobs Data

During the Public Policy Tour, we received an assignment from Senator Wyden, Tom Kalil, and several other champions of nanotechnology: in order to make the best case for nanotechnology that they can, they need jobs information from you.  Nanotechnology businesses are among the few that are hiring, and our champions want to be able to show this.  We also need anecdotes that Senators and Members of Congress can use to personalize the data – specific instances in which you are hiring people, and the impact that you are having in your communities. In the days ahead, we will be asking you to participate in a survey that will help provide this important information.

There is an an obvious need to build a case for the Senators showing that nanotechnology has created jobs, but has it? Well if you take the preferred measure of the NanoBusiness Alliance, the “Nanotechnology Industry” then i rather suspect that the number of sustainable jobs created will be under a thousand, as most “nanotech companies” seem to subsist on SBIR and DARPA grants without showing any signs of real growth.

However if we want to look at the number of jobs created by nanotechnologies then it;s a different story – GMR and the associated precision manufacturing using focused ion beams which is used in hard disks enabled the iPod, which enable a whole new industry! The same is true in composites, pharmeceuticals, textiles and many other industry sectors, but the thing the Senators were promised by the NBA was a “nanotechnology industry.”

As far back as 2002 the NBA was getting its wrists slapped for coming with with stupid and naive predictions about the size of the ‘nanotechnology industry‘. As a comparison, I have added below the conclusion of an article I wrote for European Business Forum in 2003 disagreeing with the premise of their ever being a “nanotechnology industry.”

It is those stupid and naive predictions, the hype driven by a craving for attention that are now coming back to bite the NBA.  You can imagine the awkward scene:

“Ok guys, we bought in ten years ago, we gave you the cash so show us the results? How many jobs were created?”

“erm, let me send out an email and ask”

“So, just how big is the nanotechnology industry these days?

“erm, well, there were a couple of dozen nanotech companies but a few closed down, it’s the recession y’know”

“But back in 2002 you put out a report saying there were over a hundred and it would be worth $700 billion by last year”

“erm, erm…”

Well the lesson for today, ladies and gentlemen, is it doesn’t matter whether you are hyping nanotech or running a Ponzi scheme, if you can’t deliver and you stick around too long you’ll get caught out. Most of the early nanotech boosters are now boosting clean tech, or synthetic biology, or geoengineering. While not many of them have a clue what they are talking about, at least they had enough sense to skedaddle before any of the predictions came true.

The tragedy of course, is that the tens of thousands of scientists engaged in nanoscience weren’t the ones who made those silly predictions, and weren’t the ones who egged on organisations such as the NBA to come out with ever more preposterous predictions, but will be tarred with the same brush as the boosters by the politicians.

Nourishing the roots of innovation: nanotechnology is not a disruptive force in itself, but its effect on existing products will be.

Tim Harper, 2003

A major difference between almost every historically disruptive technology and nanotechnology is that there is no focal point. In previous diffusions there is a clear path of adoption and displacement–whether water with steam, vacuum tubes with transistors or transistors with integrated circuits–based on a dominant technology. Of course no technology stands alone, so the house of cards that allows integrated circuits to exist spans polymers to metrology, but there the processing of silicon is a dominant technology. That focus has allowed the semiconductor industry to be defined, and measured. There is no nanotechnology industry, and probably never will be.

While nanotechnology can act as a magnet for funding, in terms of measuring the impact of technology, it is no more a meaningful definition than that of chemistry (the science of matter; the branch of the natural sciences dealing with the composition of substances and their properties and reactions). Our understanding of chemistry has enabled many of the world’s largest industries, but it was never embraced in the 1920s by investors and the public as the next big thing.

Perhaps a better example is our understanding of quantum mechanics, initiated by the discovery of the electron in 1897. The understanding that allows us to control the movement of electrons, initially along copper wire, and later through other materials such as silicon, has affected almost every aspect of our lives. From the light bulb to the cellphone we are ruled by quantum effects, yet no one would point to the diffusion of our understanding of the quantum realm as a disruptive technology.

So how do we track the diffusion of a technology we cannot define? Put simply, we can’t. Few consumers or even businesses give too much time to how things work, as long as they do, and they work better than the previous generation, or those of their competitors. Fundamental understanding is the job of quantum physicists and now nanotechnologists.

The answer is to look beyond nanotechnology, and to look at its effect on existing technologies. The three billion dollars of government funding worldwide has been mostly pouring into academic establishments, and the increase in our understanding of the molecular scale that it is enabling is already finding commercial applications. Business can already make use of the tools developed by academic nanoscience research to gain more insight into processes we already have some control over, whether in using nanocatalysis to improve yield and boost margins at an oil refinery, or using nanofibres to sell stain resistant clothing at a premium.

We are undergoing a period of massively parallel technological development, enabled not only by nanotechnology but also by the convergence of all branches of science. While nanotechnology may be the next big thing as far as governments and scientists are concerned, the applications will be far bigger and none of them will be called nanotechnology.

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