Tag Archives: government funding

A tale of two countries and nanotechnology strategies (part 2 of an occasional series)

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The US National Nanotechnology Initiative’s (NNI) tenth anniversary celebration titled, Nanotechnology Innovation Summit was announced about a week ago around the same time I received a copy of the documentation outlining the Canadian government’s expenditures on nanotechnology from the fiscal years 2005/6 to 2008/9.

The documentation which was issued in response to a question by Member of Parliament Peter Julian is some 80 pages that’s not organized in a way that makes for easy reading. (I interviewed Peter Julian, New Democratic Party, about his private member’s bill on nanotechnology here in part 1, part 2, and part 3.) Since there is no single nanotechnology funding hub, each ministry or funding agency issues its own records which is usually in the form of spreadsheets and each agency has its own organizing strategy. It’s going to take a little more time before I can make much sense of it but once I do, I’ll try to post it here.

Meanwhile, I found this July 26, 2010 news item about the NNI’s 10 anniversary on Nanowerk,

The Nano Science and Technology Institute (NSTI), in cooperation with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office (NNCO), announced today a National Nanotechnology Innovation Summit to mark the 10th anniversary of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) to be held December 8-10, 2010 at the Gaylord National Hotel & Convention Center in National Harbor, MD. The event, in cooperation with OSTP and NNCO and organized by NSTI, with key support from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), will serve as a forum for the nation’s nanotechnology innovators, investors, policy makers and leading corporate developers and integrators.

Since its formal launch in 2001 under President Clinton, the National Nanotechnology Initiative has strategically invested and coordinated over $12 billion in nanotechnology development. [emphasis mine] The NNI Nanotechnology Innovation Summit will spotlight revolutionary technologies from the 10-year NNI funding effort, with a special emphasis on showcasing commercially transformational technologies directly funded or catalyzed by the multi-agency partnership of the NNI. Participants will hear from some of the top researchers, industry leaders, technology investors and visionary policy makers of our time as they speak about the impact of nanotechnology innovation over the past 10 years and look toward the future.

Intriguing, yes? In the US, they can state they’ve spent 12B US over 10 years (I assume they can break those figures down) while in Canada, the figures don’t appear to have been aggregated even on agency by agency basis.

I think it comes down to a basic philosophical difference in how nanotechnology has been approached. In the US (and many other juridictions) it’s been treated as a specialty in and of itself. The approach makes sense since chemistry at the nanoscale is significantly different from chemistry at the macroscale.

In Canada, we seem to have taken the perspective that nanotechnology is a continuation of scientific exploration and while the particulars differ dramatically, nanotechnology itself is a logical progression of the scientific enterprise.

I don’t know that one approach is better than the other but the US approach makes funding questions a lot easier to answer.

Monkey writes baseball story; Feynman symposium at USC; US government releases nanotechnology data sets; World Economic Forum (at Davos) interested in science

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To my horror, researchers at Northwestern University in the US have developed software (Stats Monkey) that will let you automatically generate a story about a baseball game by pressing a button. More specifically, the data from the game is input to a database which when activated can generate content based on the game’s statistics.

I knew this would happen when I interviewed some expert at Xerox about 4 or 5 years ago. He was happily burbling on about tagging words and being able to call information up into a database and generating text automatically. I noted that as a writer I found the concept disturbing. He claimed that it would never be used for standard writing but just for things which are repetitive. I guess he was thinking it could be used for instructions and such or perhaps he was just trying to placate me. Back to stats monkey: I find it interesting that the researchers don’t display any examples of the ‘writing’. If you are interested, you can check out the project here.

The discussion about the nanotechnology narrative continues. At the University of Southern California, they will be holding a 50th anniversary symposium about the publication (in 1960)  of Feynman’s 1959 talk, There’s plenty of room at the bottom, and its impact on nanotechnology. You can read more about the event here or you can see the programme for the symposium here.

Bravo to the US government as they are releasing information to the public in a bid for transparency. Dave Bruggeman at Pasco Phronesis notes that the major science agencies had not released data sets at the time of his posting. Still, the Office of Science and Technology Policy did make data available including data about the National Nanotechnology Initiative,

The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) coordinates Federal nanotechnology research and development among 25 Federal agencies. The data presented here represent NNI investments by agency and program component area (PCA) from the Initiative’s founding in FY 2001 through FY 2010 (requested). These data have been available as part of the NNI’s annual supplements to the President’s Budget. But compared to earlier releases, the data as presented here are more accessible and readily available for analysis by users wishing to assess trends and examine investment allocations over the 10-year history of the NNI. The cumulative NNI investment of nearly $12 billion is advancing our understanding of the unique phenomena and processes that occur at the nanoscale and is helping leverage that knowledge to speed innovation in high-impact opportunity areas such as energy, security, and medicine.

You can get the data set here in either XLS or PDF formats.

It would be very difficult to get this type of information in Canada as we have no central hub for nanotechnology research funding. We do have the National Institute of Nanotechnology which is a National Research Council agency jointly funded by the province of Alberta and the federal government. Not all nanotechnology research is done under their auspices. There’s more than one government agency which funds nanotechnology research and there is no reporting mechanism that would allow us to easily find out how much funding or where it’s going.

The 2010 edition of the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos takes place January 27 – 31. It’s interesting to note that a meeting devoted to economic issues has sessions on science, social media, the arts, etc. which suggests a much broader view of economics than I’m usually exposed to. However, the session on ‘Entrepreneurial Science’ does ring a familiar note. From the session description,

According to the US National Academy of Sciences, only 0.1% of all funded basic science research results in a commercial venture.

How can the commercial viability of scientific research be improved?

I’m not sure how they derived the figure of 0.1%. Was the data international? Were they talking about government-funded research? Over what period of time? (It’s not uncommon for research to lie fallow for decades before conditions shift sufficiently to allow commercialization.) How do you determine the path from research to commercialization? e.g. Perhaps the work that resulted in a commercial application was based on 10 other studies that did not.

Government funding for nanotechnology and some thoughts on Nanotech BC

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Cientifica has a new white paper, Nanotechnology Funding in 2009, that provides an international overview of government funding for nanotechnology. There’s more information about the white paper here and Cientifica’s white paper is here. Briefly, government spending is slowing down in response to a growing maturity, i.e. nanotechnology innovations are moving out of the laboratories and into production. $40B has been invested over the last five years. From Nanowerk News,

Cientifica’s research has also reveals [sic] that the long-time leaders of nanotechnology funding, the United States and Japan, have now fallen to third and fourth behind the EU and Russia, with the US being tied with China for third.

It’s interesting that the current economic situation, according to Cientifica, is not having a major impact at this time.

I’m sure the folks at Nanotech BC (or what remains of it) would agree with Cientifica re: the slowdown in funding since they’ve had to effectively cease operation du to their failure to secure government funding. I don’t think they’d agree that it has nothing to do with the economic downturn.

And, it seems mildly ironic that Nanotech BC folks have produced a nanotechnology asset map for BC and were in the midst of developing one for Alberta when they had to yank the plug. The  irony lies in the fact that NanoKTN has just announced something similar to an asset map, a new online directory of nanotechnology enterprises for the UK. Clearly, they’re more willing to fund these types of organizations and projects in the UK.