Tag Archives: Nano Science and Technology Institute

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

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.