Two of my interests, Big Data and Nanotechnology seems to be colliding this week and that’s a bad sign? Why? Well nanotechnology is seen as a Deus Ex Machina that performs the magic step that enables or justifies other technologies, which usually means that someone hasn’t got much of a clue how to get to their imagined version of the future. As an alternative to throwing in some magic, or it all being a  dream we now have a new tool to replace random acts of god, nanotechnology.

First came a mention in the early stages of Eric Schmidt’s book ‘The New Digital Age‘ where the authors allege that nanotechnology machines in your bloodstream will apparently send back data to your doctor, although what kind of nanotech or how it may work isn’t allowed to get in the way of the big idea. I’m a quarter the way through and while there are some interesting ideas, the overall tone of the book of “Wow, the future will be really cool and enabled by all kinds of data” is beginning to annoy the cr*p out of me. If it was presented to me by one of my students I’d tell them to go back and show the working, so I could figure out how they’d got from now to the future. It has all the unfortunate hallmarks of being written by a a bunch of people with no interest in anything outside IT, and even less understanding of the real technological world. I’m with the New York Times on this one, it’s both fascinating and facile.

The theme is repeated byAdrian Asher, chief information security officer (CISO) of the Skype division at Microsoft who claims in an article headed “Big data will go mainstream when nanotechnology is embedded into humans, says Skype CISO“ perhaps after reading Schmidt’s book…

“There is much talk about networking and e-commerce uses for big data in the future but imagine in five or 10 years, if each of us had nanotechnology embedded in us to help fight various forms of diseases.

“Once those markers are present [of a disease], they will be detected and fed into your house’s gateway and then will be processed into the healthcare system. Being able to do that with animals and humans – that is when you’re really embracing big data.”

It would be more interesting see what nanotechnologists think of the impact of big data on their field.

Discussing “emerging technologies” is always a challenge as it means different things to different people. We had a go at defining it a few years ago, and Jason Pontin at MIT Technology Review justifies their shift from “emerging” to using the phrase “breakthrough technologies” in this month’s edition. Is this equally meaningless? The real problem is the word “technology” which to most people is short for Information Technology.

With a little trepidation I faced a packed room at Buy Yorkshire, as a guest of Nanofactory, to talk about our World Economic Forum Top 10 Emerging Technologies, wondering how many people would get up and leave or fiddle with their smartphones once I started talking about 3D printing and 4G nuclear power. Most people, such as Lindsey at Open Comms were pleasantly surprised.

I had the pleasure today of listening to Tim Harper from Cientifica during a seminar he was presenting at the Buy Yorkshire Conference. The title of the seminar was ’10 Emerging Technologies’ and I immediately presumed that the talk would focus on social media and the way that we communicate with our partners, stakeholders, employees and prospects – how wrong I was!

You can read the rest of Lindsey’s blog piece here, but the title “Technology – so much more than social media” sums up much of the reaction throughout the day. It’s easy to get bogged down in one particular sub sector of technology, which is why I’m happy to be involved in businesses as diverse as graphene, 3D printing, nanoparticle characterisation and carbon negative building systems.

If you missed it, you can see the presentation below, and if you want to know more just contact us.

 

One of the problems of being asked for advice is that the recipients don’t always like what they are told. This was memorably illustrated by one of the first ever reality TV shows, Troubleshooter, featuring former ICI chairman Sir John Harvey Jones. Never afraid to give blunt advice, Harvey-Jones’ solutions to struggling businesses ranged from developing  turn around plans to closing them down as quickly as possible.

Recently Dexter Johnson (AKA The Nanoclast) at IEEE Spectrum asked me for an opinion on the recently deceased NanoInk, which kicked up quite a comment storm, with various ex employees airing some long simmering grievances. But whether or not they liked my observation that NanoInk should have been closed or broken up years ago, the fact remains that the return on an investment of $150 million over ten years is, so far, zero. Unlike companies such as Amazon which balanced early losses with a compelling vision, it remains a mystery how so much money could be invested for so long without any evidence that a billion dollar nanotech behemoth was emerging.

As I spend an increasing amount of time troubleshooting – advising companies on turn around strategies or investors on buy outs, I can confirm that you don’t have to have a PhD in the technology to recognise a business that is, or soon will be in trouble.

Typical warning signs I have seen over the past few years have included

• The entire company being focussed on the technology with no one looking at the user interface – the black box was brilliant but no one apart from the company’s engineers cared about anything other than what appeared on the screen;
• Companies with far more managers and executive directors than employees – as a general rule I want to see the CEO of any start up running the equipment and making the tea as well as  negotiating deals and raising capital;
• A bunch of scientists and engineers spending all their time of developing production methods for things which they had no idea who would want to buy or why (most nanomaterials companies fall into this category), and probably the most common error
• A lack of entrepreneurial vision about where the company is going and how to get there. A successful business is all about taking a calculated risk, and any strategy that always minimises risk is bound to fail, just like any sports team that plays only defensively.

I always liked this Harvey-Jones quote which neatly sums up the attitude of many people to this kind of job:

“Everyone thinks I’m a smart arse who can solve any bloody problem, I’m not. I’m just a very old businessman and a very experienced businessman who made every mistake in the book and can recognise one when I see one.”

So how does an emerging tech business avoid winding up having the likes of Harvey-Jones or Tim Harper advising them to get out while they still have the shirt on their backs? Here’s my check list for any business, or indeed any new internal project. If you start with number two or three rather than at the beginning I’m afraid you’ll be wasting your time.

1. The Need: Who wants whatever you are proposing to make? Do you have any evidence for this need? Is the market big enough? Do you have ways of accessing the market, and if so where will you be on the value chain? 
2. The Technology: Can your technology meet this need? Can you meet it alone or do you have to buy, licence or partner with businesses with access to other technologies?
3. The Business Case: Is there a decent chance of it making money? Is it a high value, low turnover business, or a low value, large turnover one? Can the technology be protected and for how long?
4. The Team: Can you assemble a team with the right skills to get the business off the ground? At this stage it’s all about vision, determination and hard work.

Only if you can tick those four boxes is it worth considering writing a business plan or developing a new product or service. But those are just rules for minimising the chance of failure – equally important is a bit of luck, pitching to an investor in a receptive mood, an unexpected technical breakthrough, or fulfilling that order that no one else was interested in.  Just ask Richard Branson or Alan Sugar!

 

Every year I sit down with my colleagues on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies (WEF GAC-ET for short!!!!) and have a spirited discussion about what the top ten emerging technologies in the world will be.

Here then, in no particular order, is our annual expert view (or as a slideshow at the Washington Post) on what to watch this year (for comparison you find last years list here).

 

OnLine Electric Vehicles (OLEV)

Already widely used to exchange digital information, wireless technology can now also deliver electric power to moving vehicles. In next-generation electric cars, pick-up coil sets under the vehicle floor receive power remotely via an electromagnetic field broadcast from cables installed under the road surface. The current also charges an onboard battery used to power the vehicle when it is out of range. As electricity is supplied externally, these vehicles require only a fifth the battery capacity of a standard electric car, and can achieve transmission efficiencies of over 80 percent. Online electric vehicles are currently undergoing road tests in Seoul, South Korea.

 

3-D printing and remote manufacturing

Three-dimensional printing allows the creation of solid structures from a digital computer file, potentially revolutionising the economics of manufacturing if objects can be printed remotely in the home or office rather than requiring time and energy for transportation. The process involves layers of material being deposited on top of each other in order to create free-standing structures from the bottom up. Blueprints from computer-aided design are sliced into cross-section for print templates, allowing virtually-created objects to be used as models for ‘hard copies’ made from plastics, metal alloys or other materials.

 

Self-healing materials

One of the defining characteristics of living organisms is the inherent ability to repair physical damage done to them. A growing trend in biomimicry is the creation of non-living structural materials that also have the capacity to heal themselves when cut, torn or cracked. Self-healing materials which can repair damage without external human intervention could give manufactured goods longer lifetimes and reduce the demand for raw materials, as well as improving the inherent safety of structural materials used in construction or to form the bodies of aircraft.

 

Energy-efficient water purification

Water scarcity is a worsening ecological problem in many parts of the world due to competing demands from agriculture, cities and other human uses. Where freshwater systems are over-used or exhausted, desalination from the sea offers near-unlimited water but at the expense of considerable use of energy – mostly from fossil fuels – to drive evaporation or reverse osmosis systems. Emerging technologies offer the potential for significantly higher energy efficiency in desalination or purification of wastewater, potentially reducing energy consumption by 50 percent or more. Techniques such as forward osmosis can additionally improve efficiency by utilising low-grade heat from thermal power production or renewable heat produced by solar-thermal geothermal installations.

 

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) conversion and use

Long-promised technologies for the capture and underground sequestration of carbon dioxide have yet to be proven commercially viable, even at the scale of a single large power station. New technologies that convert the unwanted CO2 into saleable goods can potentially address both the economic and energetic shortcomings of conventional CCS strategies. One of the most promising approaches uses biologically-engineered photosynthetic bacteria to turn waste CO2 into liquid fuels or chemicals, in low-cost, modular solar converter systems. Whilst only operational today at the acre scale, individual systems are expected to reach hundreds of acres within as little as two years. Being 10 to 100 times as productive per unit of land area, these systems address one of the main environmental constraints on biofuels from agricultural or algal feedstock, and could supply lower carbon fuels for automobiles, aviation or other large-scale liquid fuel users.

 

Enhanced nutrition to drive health at the molecular level

Even in developed countries millions of people suffer from malnutrition due to nutrient deficiencies in their diets. Efforts to improve the situation by changing diets have met with limited success.  Now modern genomic techniques have been applied to determine at the gene sequence level the vast number of naturally-consumed proteins which are important in the human diet. The proteins identified may have advantages over standard protein supplements in that they can supply a greater percentage of essential amino acids, and have improved solubility, taste, texture and nutritional characteristics. The large-scale production of pure human dietary proteins based on the application of biotechnology to molecular nutrition can deliver health benefits such as in muscle development, managing diabetes or reducing obesity.

 

Remote sensing

The increasingly widespread use of sensors that allow often passive responses to external stimulae will continue to change the way we respond to the environment, particularly in the area of health. Examples include sensors that continually monitor bodily function – such as heart rate, blood oxygen and blood sugar levels – and if necessary trigger a medical response such as insulin provision. Advances rely on wireless communication between devices, low power sensing technologies and, sometimes, active energy harvesting.  Other examples include vehicle-to-vehicle sensing for improved safety on the road.

 

Precise drug delivery through nanoscale engineering

Pharmaceuticals which can be precisely delivered at the molecular level within or around the cell offer unprecedented opportunities for more effectively treatments while reducing unwanted side effects. Targeted nanoparticles that adhere to diseased tissue allow for the micro-scale delivery of potent therapeutic compounds while minimizing their impact on healthy tissue, and are now advancing in medical trials. After almost a decade of research, these new approaches are now finally showing signs of clinical utility, through increasing the local concentration and exposure time of the required drug and thereby increasing its effectiveness. As well as improving the effects of current drugs, these advances in nanomedicine promise to rescue other drugs, which would otherwise be rejected due to their dose-limiting toxicity.

 

Organic electronics and photovoltaics

Organic electronics – a type of printed electronics – is the use of organic materials such as polymers to create electronic circuits and devices. In contrast to traditional (silicon based) semiconductors that are fabricated with expensive photolithographic techniques, organic electronics can be printed using low-cost, scalable processes such as ink jet printing- making them extremely cheap compared with traditional electronics devices, both in terms of the cost per device and the capital equipment required to produce them. While organic electronics are currently unlikely to compete with silicon in terms of speed and density, they have the potential to provide a significant edge in terms of cost and versatility. The cost implications of printed mass-produced solar photovoltaic collectors for example could accelerate the transition to renewable energy.

 

Fourth-generation reactors and nuclear waste recycling

Current once-through nuclear power reactors only utilise 1% of the potential energy available in uranium, leaving the rest radioactively contaminated as nuclear ‘waste’. Whilst the technical challenge of geological disposal is manageable, the political challenge of nuclear waste seriously limits the appeal of this zero-carbon and highly scaleable energy technology. Spent-fuel recycling and breeding uranium-238 into new fissile material – known as ‘Nuclear 2.0’ – would extend already-mined uranium resources for centuries while dramatically reducing the volume and long-term toxicity of wastes, whose radioactivity will drop below the level of the original uranium ore on a timescale of centuries rather millennia. This makes geological disposal much less of a challenge (and arguably even unnecessary) and nuclear waste a minor environmental issue compared to hazardous wastes produced by other industries. Fourth-generation technologies, including liquid metal-cooled fast reactors, are now being deployed in several countries and are offered by established nuclear engineering companies.

 

Members of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies

 

Noubar Afeyan: CEO Flagship Ventures; Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management

 

Nayef Al-Rodhan: Senior Member, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford; Director, Geopolitics of Globalisation and Transnational Security Programme, Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Geneva

 

Angela Belcher: Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, MIT

 

Jeffrey Carbeck: 2009 Clean Energy Fellow, New England Clean Energy Council; founding Chief Technology Officer, MC10 Inc

 

Javier Garcia-Martinez: Professor of Chemistry and Director, Nanotechnology Molecular Laboratory, University of Alicante, Spain; Co-Founder, Rive Technology

 

Michael Grätzel: Professor, Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

 

Julia Greer: Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Mechanics, California Institute of Technology

 

Clare Grey: Professor of Chemistry, University of Cambridge and Stony Brook University

 

Tim Harper: CEO and President, Cientifica Ltd; Director, Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence.

 

Hu Zhijian: Secretary-General of the CPC, Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development, Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China

 

Sir David King: Founding Director, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford; Senior Science Adviser, UBS; Director, Cambridge Kaspakas; Chancellor, University of Liverpool, UK

 

Mark Lynas: Writer on climate change and environment; Visiting Research Associate, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

 

Kiyoshi Matsuda: Chief Innovation Officer, Corporate Strategy Office, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation

 

Andrew Maynard: NSF International Chair of Environmental Health Sciences, University of Michigan

 

James Wilsdon: Professor of Science and Democracy, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, UK

An interesting interview with Christine Peterson at the Foresight Institute. For those unfamiliar with Foresight, they were early proponents of nanotechnologies, but following Eric Drexler’s Nanosystems vision of small machines getting ever smaller and ignoring the laws of physics. As a result they got into all kinds of pointless fights with people from Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley to Dexter Johnson, aka The Nanoclast.

What’s interesting that the ‘molecular nanotechnology’ proponents seem to have flipped from ‘replacing all manufacturing within five years’ to ‘maybe in ten to fifty years.’

While I may not agree with their version of physical reality, I do have a lot of admiration for people like Christine, and the Foresight Institute. While they may have been a bunch of computer geeks with no idea of the technologies or challenges involved beyond what they had seen on Star Trek, they did help popularise the subject and bring it to a wider non scientific audience. The ambition to ‘totally heal the earth’ is a laudable one, whereas the assertion that nanotechnology will allow people “to eat meat and fish without killing animals” is more questionable from both technical and gastronomical viewpoints!

 

I woke up this morning to find graphene was ubiquitous, even displacing snow as the main topic of conversation. I’m getting emails from sports stores and even the BBC breakfast news was full of it, although tempering the hype with the question ‘Is graphene really a wonder-material?’ before concluding “The miracle material will soak up a lot of money but, taking a long view, it’s unlikely that much will be wasted.”

A second article takes the typically British view that although we invented it (or more correctly, its properties were discovered in Britain by a couple of Russian emigres) it will end up being commercialised abroad, just like democracy, the jet engine, computers, industry etc etc etc. The evidence for this comes from an analysis of graphene IP which shows UK entities lagging badly behind China, the US and Korea.

Nationality	Number of graphene patent publications
SOURCE: Q TANNOCK, CAMBRIDGEIP, 2013
Chinese entities	2,204
US entities	1,754
South Korean entities	1,160
United Kingdom entities	54

Is this true? Perhaps the picture is not as grim as the IP statistics make out. The UK has a number of companies producing decent quality graphene – a prerequisite for any applications – and the history of nanotechnology shows us that filing huge numbers of patents is no guarantee of commercial success.

What is clear, however, is that other countries woke up to the possibilities of graphene long before the award of a Nobel Prize woke up Britain’s dozy bunch, resulting in much more funding for entities in the rest of the world.

For the UK, and the rest of Europe to capitalise on its word class research infrastructure, politicians need to be much more proactive about stimulating technology spin outs, or ‘gambling with public money’ as it is known in the corridors of power. While governments are wary of picking winners, moving from squandering to gambling might be a step in the right direction.

There’s not much innovation in the world of marketing, as demonstrated by tennis rival Head’s announcement of its new graphene racquets as used by Novak Djokovic and Maria Sharapova. A series of videos extol the benefits of this new wonder material.

It’s almost ten years since French racquet manufacturer Babolat jumped on the nanotech bandwagon with the world’s first tennis racquet incorporating carbon nanotube technology. The company’s claims at the time, based on loading the composite with a very small quantity of nanotubes were

• Five times more rigid than current carbon racquets
• Molecular organization, as pure as that of a diamond, makes it the ideal material to use between the sweetspot and the handle.
• High driving properties
• Enhanced performance for the stabilizers between the sweetspot and handle thanks to this real concentration of power and purity .
• More power and feeling in real time.

 The product marketing claimed that the new technology was “100 times more rigid than steel [and 6 times lighter!], 10 times stiffer than conventional graphite. Carbon Nanotube ™ is the ideal material. Extremely resistant and highly reactive, it provides power to the racquet through rigidity and playing sensations never experienced before.”

 

Head gush in a similar fashion about graphene…

Discovered in 2004, Graphene™ consists of a single two-dimensional layer of carbon atoms. This material has a breaking strength 200 times greater than steel, which makes it the ultimate substance for creating new HEAD tennis racquet frames with exceptional properties. Graphene™ technology allows for the first time an optimal redistribution of weight in HEAD racquets. Through the use of Graphene™ in the shaft, the weight in the middle part of the tennis racquet can be reduced. Instead, weight can be shifted to more functionally relevant areas in the grip and racquet head. This unique construction provides players with an unmatched maneuverability and an increased swingweight. In other words, a racquet with Graphene™ is easier to swing and enables even more powerful shots. And it will give opponents a really hard time.

Fast forward ten years and Babolat seem to have given up on carbon nanotubes and are now touting graphite, and graphite incorporating tungsten fibres as the new peak of performance. There’s no mention of carbon nanotubes anywhere, the wonder materials that nearly was.

Another common feature is the use of the ™ symbol after the material name, Babolat use Carbon Nanotube™ and Head have PLAY YOUR BEST GAME EVER WITH GRAPHENE™.

While transferring the physical properties of graphene to the macroscale appears somewhat more straightforward than with nanotubes could Head have backed the technology equivalent of Elvis rather than Carl Perkins?

In the end it hardly matters, from Dennis Lilleee’s aluminium cricket bat or Rafael Nadal’s graphite to Maria Sharapova’s graphene, it’s not the materials technology that sells sports goods, it’s the celebrity endorsements that enable even talentless tennis oafs like me to feel that, through graphene, we have a link with the sporting elite. Now, where did I hang my Sir Bradley Wiggins mohair suit?

The World Economic Forum publishes its Global Risks Report 2013 today, and my opinion is buried in there somewhere among the other thousand experts. It’s always a fascinating document, although it is a survey of opinion, hence nanotechnology being defined as a high likelihood high impact risk eight years ago!

That said, the first paragraph of the report flags carbon nanotubes as a risk on a par with asbestos, which although similar in morphology are vastly different in both application and the attitude of manufacturers to health and safety.

The nature of global risks is constantly changing. Thirty years ago, chlorofluorocar­bons (CFCs) were seen as a planetary risk, while threat from a massive cyber attack was treated by many as science fiction. In the same period, the proliferation of nuclear weapons occupied the minds of scientists and politicians, while the proliferation of orbital debris did not. We see a similar story with asbestos then and carbon nanotubes today, and the list goes on.

The good news for nanotechnologies is that their unforeseen consequences are still a low risk, low impact issue, as they have been for many years now, although the potential impact seems to have edged up a little.  More relevant to emerging technologies are the gradual progression towards the upper right quadrant, symbolising high likelihood and high impact, of the unforeseen consequences of new life science technologies and climate change mitigation, i.e. geoengineering (of which more later). To some extent the likelihood and severity of risks are a function of their visibility, the NGO’s that were using nanotechnology as a poster child for all that is bad about technology – creating a north-south imbalance, controlled by an elite, lack or transparency etc. – have all moved onto other issues meaning that while the risks still exist, they are much less visible.

Another issue flagged by the Global Risks Report 2013 is that experts views differ from those of non-specialists, so environmental experts are far more alarmed by climate change than those withe no direct involvement, while experts in nanotechnology and life sciences are less worried about unforeseen consequences than others. The report asks:

Are economists more informed about economic issues than others, or are there ideological differences at play? Are the technological specialists more knowledgeable here, or does their excitement about new technologies dampen their risk perceptions? And where experts are more worried, does that mean that we should listen to them more, or do they just feel more strongly about their issue without knowing enough about other threats?

Perhaps it is all of the above?

Reports of this nature are a useful starting point to identify risks, taking action is more difficult. Indeed some of the most severe risks such as chronic fiscal imbalances or diffusion of weapons of mass destruction are either insoluble or can only be addressed at a global level, but are there others that we can head off?

At Cientifica we have looked at using emerging technologies to mitigate some of the risks identified by the WEF, food and water shortages, and the vulnerability of the supply of critical minerals for example. Through a number of on going initiatives we are working to ensure that we can at least attempt to find cures for some of the inevitable crises that will lead to plenty of human suffering and even war. While technology is not the only solution to risk mitigation, it requires political and diplomatic effort too, though the efforts of the WEF Global Council on Emerging Technologies, technology is at least appearing on the geopolitical agenda with a far greater frequency than in the past.

The Global Risks Report 2013 contains a few questionable statement however, such as this discussion of the need to combat antibiotic resistant bacteria, which seems to advocate diverting effort away from understanding the genomics of bacteria to researching herbal cures!

An increasing amount of effort has been invested in exploring the potential of new life science technologies such as genomics, nano-scale engineering and synthetic biology, without yet yielding new approaches in the treatment of bacterial disease. One unintended consequence of this has been to divert researchers’ attention from the traditional approach of discovering natural compounds to kill bacteria, which may be getting harder.

New for this year is the inclusion of X Factors, summarised below, emerging concerns of possible future importance and with unknown consequences, developed in conjunction with Nature.

Runaway Climate Change

The threat of climate change is well known. But have we passed the point of no return? What if we have already triggered a runaway chain reaction that is in the process of rapidly tipping Earth’s atmosphere into an inhospitable state?

 

Significant Cognitive Enhancement

Once the preserve of science fiction, superhuman abilities are fast approaching the horizon of plausibility. Will it be ethically accepted for the world to divide into the cognitively-enhanced and unenhanced? What might be the military implications?

 

Rogue Deployment of Geoengineering

In response to growing concerns about climate change, scientists are exploring ways in which they could, with international agreement, manipulate the earth’s climate. But what if this technology were to be hijacked by a rogue state or individual?

 

Costs of Living Longer

We are getting better at keeping people alive for longer. Are we setting up a future society struggling to cope with a mass of arthritic, demented and, above all, expensive, elderly who are in need of long term care and palliative solutions?

 

Discovery of Alien Life

Given the pace of space exploration, it is increasingly conceivable that we may discover the existence of alien life or other planets that could support human life. What would be the effects on science funding flows and humanity’s self-image?It was only in 1995 that we first found evidence that other stars also have planets orbiting them. Now thousands of “exoplanets” revolving around distant stars have been detected. NASA’s Kepler mission to identify Earth-sized planets located in the “Goldilocks Zone” (not too hot, nor too cold) of Sun-like stars, has only been operating for 3 years and has already turned up thousands of candidates, including one the size of Earth. The fact that Kepler has found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy. In 10 years’ time we may have evidence not only that Earth is not unique, but that life exists elsewhere in the universe.

 

Nanotechnology has produced no shortage of wonder materials, Buckyballs anyone? Trimetaspheres? Or even carbon nanotubes where producing them at anywhere near the cost that anyone would be willing to pay for them has been a struggle.

The main problem with many nanomaterials is that while they may have wondrous properties, conductivity, tensile strength, the ability to cure cancer or produce unlimited energy from fresh air, these properties are often confined to a few square nanometres, and connecting this to the outside world, which would allow these properties to be exploited has been problematic.

I was wondering the same thing about graphene. While the properties can extend over larger areas, they only do so in two dimensions, and producing large enough quantities by CVD for example looks prohibitively expensive. This is confirmed by a recent review article in Nature, A Roadmap for Graphene, whose authors include Konstatntin Novoselov who shared the Nobel Prize with Andre Geim for the discovery of graphene, and others from AstraZeneca, BASF, Texas Instruments and Samsung – which adds a bit of commercial weight to the usual academic output. One conclusion stands out though, the fact that, unlike most other nanomaterials, the graphene doesn’t have to be a perfect 2-D sheet with infinite dimensions to work.

Physicists are used to thinking of graphene as a perfect two-dimensional lattice of carbon atoms. However, the paradigm is now shifting as pure science opens new technology routes: even less-than-perfect layers of graphene can be used in certain applications. In fact, different applications require different grades of graphene, bringing closer widespread practical implementation of this material.

The final part of the puzzle is how to transfer these wondrous properties to the real world, because unless we can get graphene into a form that can be used in a real world application, whether printing electronics, as a filler in polymers or as an ultracapacitor it’s still just soot.

Haydale in South Wales may have found a solution with their new printable graphene inks. A variety of applications are suggested in the press release, but printed electronics and its cousin additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) would seem to be obvious applications. Even more intriguingly the company talks about silicon-graphene for use in printed batteries that, if combined with printed solar could go into just about everything.

So while most nanomaterials tend to reach a dead end, the applications of graphene just keep on coming, and the material doesn’t even need to be perfect.

Perfect!

After spending ten years running a variety of technology businesses in Madrid, Spain, I’m occasionally invited to contribute my thoughts as to how to escape the current economic crisis. While I’m not a huge fan of Paul Krugman I do agree that we need to start thinking about growth, and that breaking the vicious cycle of firefighting is needed if we are to plan for the future.

The most worrying aspect of Spanish government planning, or rather lack of it, is that everyone I speak to seems to have a hundred urgent things to do before they can start even thinking about the future. Well if you want the economy to go the way of Hewlett Packard that’s fine, but my overwhelming impression remains that most Spanish government agencies live in mortal dread of actually having to do anything.

I do have skin in this game, I still have family in Madrid, and it annoys the **** out of me to watch the clueless ham fisted dimwits in Madrid running around slashing budgets and killing projects with no thought about what to do beyond their next paycheck while anyone under 30 has long since figured out that there are no safe jobs in government and banks anymore.

You can read my original thoughts in El Pais in the article “El motor de la riqueza es el emprendedor” or a translation below.

I spent much of this year talking to a variety of Spanish government agencies about innovation, and I got a strong impression that with the current economic crisis,supporting entrepreneurs is the last thing they want to hear about.

Let’s face it, when you are under pressure to cut your departmental budget by 40% while being asked to take a pay cut yourself, it’s hard to take time out from applying for safe jobs in international organisations to discuss supporting anyone else, and that is a large part of the problem.

The economy isn’t driven by people making budget cuts on excel spread sheets, it is driven by the people who create wealth, the people we call entrepreneurs, who set up companies, employ people and pay taxes. If Spain is to effect any kind of economic recovery, it will come from the coffee shops of Zaragoza, Leon, and Malaga rather than the National Ministerios of Madrid. At present the World Economic Forum ranks Spain as the world’s 36th most competitive economy, below Chile, Estonia and Oman, while Cientifica’s index of the best places to commercialise emerging technologies has it below Portugal, Indonesia and Puerto Rico. Something needs to change.

In the 21st century innovation doesn’t happen in isolation any more. Scientists,engineers and entrepreneurs are globally networked so that information flows freely, and although capital can still be hard to raise, innovation now has no borders. Butthere are still few models that take advantage of this new world, and for once Madrid’s regional government is showing the way.

The Madrid–MIT M+Visión Consortium created by the Comunidad de Madrid and MIT is an example of how cross border collaboration can stimulate economic activity by connecting one of the US’s leading universities with Madrid’s scientificcommunities. As the Consortium aims to stimulate innovation in medical imaging it also involves big teaching hospitals in Madrid and Boston and the results after just two years are impressive. The project has already fostered a number of innovations in the biomedical field, all of which have the potential for significant impact in health care, and some of which are almost ready for commercialization.

But an international consortium also poses a dilemma: with entrepreneurs being mobile, the resulting companies could end up being located anywhere. As a first step towards economic recovery, Spain needs to find ways to become globally competitive, to attract and retain entrepreneurs. Politicians need to look beyond the short-term pain, and create a fertile environment for innovation and entrepreneurship.