Michael Berger of the useful Nanowerk website has produced a clarification essay on the size of the nanotechnology market, helping to put the hype in perspective. Some excerpts: First of all, these market size forecasts are dealing with what is called evolutionary nanotechnology. The goal of evolutionary nanotechnology is to improve existing ...

Small Times reports on a meeting held in Oregon among a wide variety of nanotechnology-based business participants, at which many commercialization challenges were discussed. One was difficulties encountered with the U.S. Patent office: Start-ups expressed frustration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Long waits for patent ...

We mentioned earlier the Harvard Business Review list of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007. Nanotechnology shows up again in another idea on the list — this one rather more controversial. Phillip Longman observes that falling birthrates lead, over time, to an increase in families with more conservative values, because they reproduce more. Seems ...

The Harvard Business Review has named its top 20 Breakthrough Ideas for 2007, and home-based, atomically-precise manufacturing makes the list. Business in the Nanocosm, by UC Berkeley business prof Rashi Glazer, does a good job of conveying the future of home-based nanomanufacturing. Excerpts: Conventional manufacturing carves or distills a ...

In case you missed the China webcast by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, here’s a short summary from IT Week by Clement James: China bets big on nanotech Country takes aim at $3 trillion global market in nanotech products Nanotechnology is key to the future economic success ...

Foresight members and others would like to find ways to use nanotechnology to help those who need help the most. It’s a challenge, as described more generally by Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik, and Arvind Subramanian, writing in Foreign Affairs. They suggest a solution, which ought to work for nanotech as well as medical [...]

A story by Jon Van describes the growing backlog of nanotechnology patent applications: As the time it takes to process patent applications now averages almost four years, double the time it took in 2004, nanotech entrepreneurs are beginning to worry that their ability to raise money to develop products may be stifled. It’s not just ...

Here’s a nanotech news item from the Financial Express (India) that shows the challenge that developing countries such as India face in their efforts to leapfrog over intermediate levels of technology directly to operating right at the cutting edge: Indian nanotech firm to move to Singapore Singapore, November 1: Bangalore-based ...

Darrell Dvorak at MidwestBusiness.com points out that there’s often some expertise missing from discussions on nanotech risk: Because nanotech operates at the molecular level, there has been much speculation about new, unknown risks of nano products and processes… An encouraging development for a fact-based approach is that ...

The role of nanotechnology in the developing world is questioned by Prof. Guillermo Foladori of Mexico in his Nanotechnology Law & Business article “Nanotechnology in Latin America at the Crossroads” (free abstract, full PDF requires a fee or subscription). Prof. Foladori reminds us of nanotech’s potential to alleviate ...