Tag Archives: Troy McConaghy

Canadian business triumphs again! US company acquires Cananano Technologies

As I have noted on more than one occasion, the ‘success’ model in Canadian technology-based businesses is predicated on a buy-out, i.e. develop and grow your business so you can sell it and retire. The news about Canadian Nano Technologies (Canano) fits very well into this model. From the Jan. 12, 2011 news item on Nanotechnology Now,

Arkansas-based NanoMech, Inc. announced today that it has acquired Canadian Nano Technologies, LLC (Canano).

Canano (www.CanadianNano.com) provides custom engineered nanopowders designed to solve unique problems, adding value to products that span multiple industries including electronics, agriculture, solar energy, and aerospace. The company was founded to develop and commercialize applications of pure metal nanopowders. Using a proprietary gas condensation process partially based on research carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Canano produces a wide variety of high-quality nanoparticles. Their proprietary process is unique and offers significant improvements over other nanoparticle production/collection processes.

NanoMech is a leading designer and manufacturer of nanoparticle-based additives, coatings and coating deposition systems.

Richard Tacker, Founder and CEO of Canano said, “Our customers have seen the value that our custom-engineered nanopowders bring to their products, and as a result the demand for our materials is growing rapidly. By joining NanoMech we can take advantage of their excellent management team, nanomanufacturing expertise, and scale up our production capacity to serve existing and future customers.”

The Canadian technology certainly has some interesting applications,

The nanopowder technology applications include advance methods of improving: nutrient replacement fertilizers and environmentally safe pesticides and conductive inks for printed circuit boards, RFID’s, photovoltaic printed solar cells, solar connectors, surface coatings, new generation ballistics, RF shielding, self-cleaning surfaces, solar heaters, condensers , silicon wafers, solid rocket fuels, and primers. Other applications include textiles, nano fabrics for clothing and car seat covers, odor free materials, cosmetics, sunscreens, deodorants, lip balm, cleansing products, surface protectants, cleaning chemicals, antibacterial coatings, scratch resistant surfaces, thermal barriers, super hydrophobic, dielectrics, wound dressings, lighter, stronger sports equipment, smart materials, air purifiers, water filtration and bio-aerosols, safety, sun and high definition glasses, non-reflective and smart shielding, odor free refrigerators and washing machines, automotive parts, chip resistant paints, non-corrosives, cement, concrete, and fuel savers, and much more.

Meanwhile, the discussion about innovation in Canada continues as we try to figure out why we aren’t better at innovating as per a Jan. 12, 2011 article by John Lorinc for University Affairs. (Thanks to Rob Annan for the tip via Twitter.) Lorinc notes in his article,

In its ninth report on the state of Ontario’s competitiveness, the task force headed by Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, argues that low productivity in the country’s manufacturing heartland has led to low prosperity, revealing an “innovation gap.” Professor Martin writes that public policy is more concerned with science-driven inventions that, while very important to society, won’t necessarily lead to products and services that consumers want – and thus products and services that could improve Ontario’s innovation capabilities. [emphasis mine]

I am not sure that a focus on ‘science-driven inventions’ is the big problem. Certainly our inventions seem attractive to large foreign companies and corporations as per the Canano experience and many others. The article even points out that Apple is currently pursuing RIM, which is, for now, the largest Canadian technology company.

The perspective from William Polushin from McGill  is closer to my own,

For many years, William Polushin has taught a core international business undergraduate course at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. Each year Mr. Polushin (who’s also founding director of the Desautels program for international competitiveness, trade and innovation) polls his students about their attitudes towards entrepreneurship and innovation by asking whether they see themselves as the next Bill Gates – in other words, as individuals who will come up with an innovation that could be a game-changer. Year after year, the response rate is consistent: only about 10 percent say they see themselves in this kind of role. By comparison, at a recent conference on North American competitiveness in Mexico City, he asked the students in the audience to raise their hands if they saw themselves running their own businesses in the future. “Well over half put up their hands,” he says.

The results of his straw polls tell a story. Canada has not been especially successful at fostering an innovation mindset among successive generations of business grads and entrepreneurs. Mr. Polushin says, “We don’t have a strong risk orientation in our own country.” [emphasis mine] Most of his students aspire to work in large companies, even though the supply of Canadian-based multinationals continues to shrink due to consolidation. The result, he says, is that much R&D and innovation activity occurs elsewhere.

For a bit of contrast,

Although he’s based at the epicentre of Ottawa’s policy machinery, veteran Statistics Canada economist John Baldwin has a message that runs sharply counter to much of the conventional wisdom that emanates from the capital’s think tanks. “There’s an awful lot of innovation taking place,” says Dr. Baldwin, director of StatsCan’s economic analysis division. The problem is that Canadian policy doesn’t recognize it as such.

I think that’s true too and illustrates the point that discussion about innovation in Canada is complex and nuanced. I recommend reading Lorinc’s entire article.

Todd Babiuk’s article for the Edmonton Journal, Canada failing to create culture of innovation, provides an insider’s perspective from Peter Hackett,

He was, for five years, the president and CEO of a now-shuttered endowment fund called Alberta Ingenuity. The mandate of Alberta Ingenuity, devised to be independent of the provincial government, was to encourage and support innovation in science, technology and engineering. This innovation would lead to spinoff companies that would create fabulous wealth and opportunity for Albertans, attract talented people, and diversify the economy.

Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t the president and CEO of an independent organization. Alberta Ingenuity has been replaced by Alberta Innovates, and it is operated by the department of Advanced Education and Technology.

“What I take from it, in terms of lessons, is it’s thrilling to watch a group of people take a great product to the market,” said Hackett, in his current office at the University of Alberta’s National Institute for Nanotechnology, where he is a fellow. Before he arrived in Alberta, Hackett did similar work at the National Research Council in Ottawa, spinning Canadian research into businesses.

“But in 15 years of an innovation agenda, honestly,” he said, “governments have accomplished nothing.”

On a YouTube video shot at the Canadian Science Policy Centre in late 2010, Hackett criticizes the Canadian government’s unhelpful and backward interventions into business, through the tax system.

If you’re making a profit, we’re going to help you. But if you’re growing, we won’t. [emphasis mine] In the U.S., it’s completely the other way around. That’s why they have a lot of small companies that grow into big companies.”

In the same video he outlines, briefly and rather devastatingly, the problem with venture capital in Canada. “Government’s intervention into venture capital has ruined the ability for Canadian companies to grow,” he says.

… “We created a tax break for investing in venture capital,” he said, in his office. “So it was about the tax break, not this great company: Facebook, whatever you like. It’s absurd!”

Point well taken regarding the tax break for venture capital. As I recall, there were similar issues with film funding tax breaks. These were addressed and finally, real movies as opposed to ‘tax break’ movies got funded. Part of the problem with government tax programmes such as tax breaks for venture capital funding or film funding is the law of unintended (and counterproductive) consequences and the extraordinarily long time it takes to resolve them.

There was one other point in Hackett’s interview, “If you’re making a profit, we’re going to help you. But if you’re growing, we won’t,” which is well illustrated by Rob Annan’s Nov. 30, 2010 posting (on the Researcher Form blog) where he discusses this phenomenon in the context of Medicago,

Medicago is a Canadian company that produces vaccines in tobacco plants instead of using traditional egg-production techniques. This allows a much more rapid development and deployment of seasonal and pandemic vaccines. Their proprietary technology, currently in phase I and II clinical trials, was developed in Canada thanks in part to government funding …

They’ve been awarded numerous Canadian business and technology awards. They have translated these investments and successes into millions of dollars in private sector investment and a public listing on the TSX. Not bad for a company based out of Quebec City.

So what’s wrong with this obvious success story?

Medicago made the news this week because the US Department of Defense is investing $21-million to build a 90,000 sq ft state-of-the art production facility in North Carolina. The facility will be able to produce 120-million pandemic vaccine doses annually or 40-million seasonal vaccine doses annually. In a news release, the US government recognizes the company’s ability to bolster domestic vaccine supply, respond more rapidly than traditional methods, and bring “hundreds of good paying jobs” to the region.

The 90,000 sq ft facility in North Carolina will dwarf the current estimated 15,000 sq ft dedicated to production in Quebec City, and will inevitably shift the company’s focus south.

The Canadian government’s response?

According to CBC news, Health Canada remains committed to egg-based vaccines …

While it’s discouraging to read about, I like to find hope in the fact that innovation in Canada is being discussed and folks seem to be interested in finding ways to promote and nurture innovation in Canada.

Teaching nanotechnology in 2nd Life

I’m not sure if this is “applying nanotechnology to health problems” or if it’s nanomedicine but that’s what Ananth Annapragada, Ph.D., holder of the Robert H. Graham Professorship of Entrepreneurial Biomedical Informatics and Bioengineering at the University of Texas (UT) Health School of Biomedical Informatics and fellow at the IC² Institute, an interdisciplinary research unit of The University of Texas at Austi (also on the faculty of the UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and UT Austin Department of Biomedical Engineering [that’s a lot of job titles]), is teaching distance education students via 2nd Life.

From the news item on Nanowerk,

When he is not teaching students how to apply nanotechnology to health problems, Annapragada is building miniaturized drug delivery systems engineered to ferry agents through the bloodstream to specific targets. His nanocarriers are so small they are measured in billionths of a meter.

“It was a leap of faith to see if this would work,” said Annapragada, who is making his teaching debut in Second Life. “I’m getting the equivalent if not better class participation.”

Annapragada likes the fact that he can gather students from different locations in the same virtual classroom at the same time. “Everyone gets the same learning experience,” he said. “It reduces a geographically-distributed student group to the same interactive common denominator.”

Beginning the three-hour class with a short lecture, he then divides students into work groups. During the next hour or so, he “turns the students loose” to work on a nano problem. He normally concludes with a lecture.

Targeted drug delivery is a hot topic in nanomedicine and was the subject of a recent class. When medicine is injected into the bloodstream, often relatively little reaches its intended target.

One nano solution being researched by Annapragada and others in the field involves packaging drugs in tiny carriers designed to bind to diseased cells. It requires extensive knowledge of the interaction between the substances on the surfaces of both the drug carrier and the diseased cell.

The students’ nano problem that day was to develop a nanocarrier for targeting brain tumors. Their homework was to come up with the specifics.

There are students from UTHealth, UT Austin, Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. Their degree programs include biology, biomedical engineering and physics. Some are enrolled in the Nanobiology Interdisciplinary Graduate Training Program operated by the Gulf Coast Consortia. There are 25 in the class.

“This is the only nanomedicine course in the UT System that I’m aware of,” Annapragada said. “It’s appropriate that I’m using the novel methodology of Second Life. Nanomedicine is an evolving field. There is no textbook. We are writing the textbook as we go.”

I heard a presentation by Dr. DeNel Rehberg Sedo about teaching in a 2nd Life classroom at a 2007 conference for the Association of Internet Researchers. Contrary to expectations, for the most part her students in Nova Scotia (Canada) at Mount St. Vincent University did not take to 2nd Life easily nor were they were particularly enthused about the experience.

There are a number of possibilities as to why that may have been the case. (1) The students were studying communication and/or public relations programmes; subjects which may not lend themselves easily to a virtual classroom.  (2) The year 2007 would represent fairly early adoption of a new technology for the classroom  (Brava DeNel! and students!) and early adoption is always littered with setbacks and problems as students and instructors “write the textbook as they go.” (3) Students in 2007 may not have had sufficiently powerful systems for the 2nd Life environment. (I was in a student programme and found that while I had a system that was the minimum required for 2nd Life participation, the minimum just wasn’t good enough.)

Another early adopter of 2nd Life was the UK’s National Physical Laboratory. They featured a nanotechnology outreach project, Nanolands which was in part designed by Troy McConaghy, a Canadian who amongst other activities produces science exhibits in 2nd Life. (my Sept. 3 2008 interview with Troy)

I find these bits of news and information intriguing as I am fascinated by the increasing inroads that new media and social media are making into how science and technology are communicated and discussed.

Flies carry nanoparticles; EPA invites comments; scientific collaboration in virtual worlds

A new study is suggesting that flies exposed to nanoparticles in manufacturing areas or other places with heavy concentrations could accumulate the particles on their bodies and transport them elsewhere. From the media release on Nanowerk News,

During the experiments, the researchers noted that contaminated flies transferred nanoparticles to other flies, and realized that such transfer could also occur between flies and humans in the future. The transfer involved very low levels of nanoparticles, which did not have adverse effects on the fruit flies.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Flies pick up and transport all manner of entities so why wouldn’t they pick up nanoparticles in their vicinity?

In other news, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has asked for comments on case studies of nanoscale titanium dioxide in water treatment and sunscreens. Presumably you have to be a US citizen to participate. For more information on the call for comments, check out this item on Nanowerk News. From the item,

EPA is announcing a 45-day public comment period for the draft document, Nanomaterial Case Studies: Nanoscale Titanium Dioxide in Water Treatment and Topical Sunscreen (External Review Draft), as announced in the July 31, 2009 Federal Register Notice. The deadline for comments is September 14, 2009.

Yesterday, I came across an announcement about scientific collaboration in a virtual world (specifically Second Life). It’s the first professional scientific organization, Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), based entirely in a virtual world.

This idea contrasts somewhat with the NanoLands concept from the National Physical Laboratory in the UK where an organization with a physical location creates a virtual location. (You can see my interview with Troy McConaghy, part of the original NanoLands design team, here.)  The project blog seems to have been newly revived and you can find out more about NanoLands and their latest machinima movies. (If you want to see the machinima, you need a Second Life account.)

What I found particularly interesting about MICA is this bit from their media release on Physorg.com,

In addition to getting people together in a free and convenient way, virtual worlds can offer new possibilities for scientific visualization or “visual analytics.” As data sets become larger and more complex, visualization can help researchers better understand different phenomena. Virtual worlds not only offer visualization, but also enable researchers to become immersed in data and simulations, which may help scientists think differently about data and patterns. Multi-dimensional data visualization can provide further advantages for certain types of data. The researchers found that they can encode data in spaces with up to 12 dimensions, although they run into the challenge of getting the human mind to easily grasp the encoded content.

Shades of multimodal discourse! More tomorrow.

Interview with Troy McConaghy (part of the Nano Lands team)

The Nano Lands project is the UK’s National Plysical Laboratory’s (NPL) Second Life Nanotechnology project. It’s a virtual environment where they’ve developed a whole series of nano displays and experiences. Troy McConaghy who helped to construct Nano Lands very kindly answered some questions about himself and the project,

What you do: I do projects in the virtual world Second Life.

Where are you located: (Ontario?) Yes, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

[How did you get the job?] I knew a guy working at NPL from our involvement with the International Spaceflight Museum, among other things.  He wanted to hire me to do this job and I accepted the offer.

Did you know much about nanotech before you started? A little bit.

What did you learn about nanotech from working on this project? I learned a lot about nanotech, from the exhibits and events that happened while I was on that project: how MOSFETs are built, how AFMs work, the history of nanotubes, how the University of Waterloo set up the first undergraduate program in nanotechnology and much more.

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to vast Nano Lands? Do you mean visit? You can visit them today – just open the “Map” in Second Life and look for “Nanotechnology” – it’s the name of the sim. Then teleport there.

What advantages does a virtual environment offer for someone wanting to find out about nanotech? You can see models and simulations that would either be impossible or very expensive in the physical world.

Is there anything you’d like to add? One should really be careful to distinguish nanoscience from nanotechnology. Science is not technology.

(Interview Edited [October 25, 2010] to change font size and increase readibility.) More about Troy McConaghy here.  For those not familiar with the abbreviation AFM, that’s an atomic force microscope, which is often used when working at the nanoscale. I had to look up MOSFET and according to Wikipedia, it’s a metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect-transistor, which is used to amplify or switch electronic signals. My guess is that they use this device at the NPL and decided to reproduce it in Second Life.

That last comment of McConaghy’s about science and technology is interesting for a number of reasons. Nanotechnology in particular has a problem. While the idea was more or less defined by Richard Feynman, a physicist, in a talk he gave in 1959 (there’s some debate about where it really starts by literary theorists), The idea was named ‘nanotechnology’ by Norio Taniguchi, an engineer, in 1974. It then got popularized by another engineer, K. Erci Drexler in his 1986 book, ‘Engines of Creation’. I have more about the origins story on my wiki. (if you want to check it out, go to studentnanomysteries.pbwiki.com and either use the origins tag or View all pages and check out the ‘Storytellers create nano’ and the ‘Modern Times’ pages.

Back to science and technology, I think the genie is out of the bottle where nanotechnology is concerned. Personally, I don’t like the conflation and I don’t think the increasing pressure that scientists of all stripes are under to do only work that has commercial applications (the sooner, the better) is good for us as a society.  We need the dreams and we need the ideas not just because they might be useful some day in the future but because it enriches us all in some indefinable, unquantifiable fashion.