Nanointermediaries in Commerce

The information technology (IT) revolution completely changed how business was conducted. A key change was the elimination of the “middle man,” an institutional feature of trade for centuries, and its replacement by an electronic intermediary, the most famous example being the online commerce Website eBay. Scientists anticipate that with the advent of nanotechnology, further revolutionary changes are on the horizon. However, in contrast to IT, huge investments are needed to start nanotech companies. In addition, the definition of nanotechnology has gone way beyond Richard Feynman's 1959 and K. Eric Drexler's 1986 vision of molecular manufacturing. In the contemporary world, it includes research in chemistry and materials science as well as molecular engineering, and therefore any definition of “nanointermediaries” would depend on the particular field that the term refers to.

In business, analysts separate nanotech companies into three categories: “simple,” “building small,” and “building large” technologies. For example, within the building small category are markets like electronics, energy, and the life sciences that are likely to be impacted by nanotech. These can be further subdivided, as for example, the market for nanotechnology in life sciences can include diagnostic devices, pharmaceuticals, [Page 491]drug discoveries, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. Within diagnostic devices, there also exist more specific subcategories, such as diagnostic devices based on genetic or proteomic markers. Within each of these diagnostic devices, there are further markets for purification, amplification, and identification technologies. Thus the position of a nanointermediary is not defined as much by the role that it plays, but rather by its specialization and superspecialization within a very narrow category.

In the same way, one of the most lucrative markets for nanotechnology—the energy sector—has its own subdivisions. Thus, nanomaterials are expected to play an important role in very specialized areas of energy production, such as photovoltaics, hydrogen production, fuel cells, and thermoelectricity. Within these areas there is further subdivision based on specialty: such as dye-sensitized photoelectrochemical devices, nanostructured thermoelectric materials, nanosized electrodes and electrolytes for fuel cells, and nanomaterial-based photoelectrochemical water splitting, with all of these categories requiring enormous amounts of funding. Therefore, the phenomenon during the IT revolution of companies that were started on a shoestring or in a garage is unlikely to be replicated in the nanotechnology revolution, at least not in the early stages.

The term nanointermediaries also has a technical definition, meaning a halfway stage between nanomaterials (nanoscale structures in an unprocessed form, such as carbon nanotubes) and nanoenabled products (finished products that incorporate nanotechnology, such as chips used in the medical field). In this sense, nanoin-termediaries are defined as intermediate products with nanoscale features, and examples include coatings, sensors, or biomedical electrodes.

One way of setting up a nanointermediary company is to buy nanomaterials, and then sell them to creators of nanoenabled products that serve various markets. Thus, for example, companies can create business relationships with biotechnological companies that are interested in therapeutic drug delivery. In this business model, the first stage of nanotechnology, namely the creation of nanomaterials, such as quantum dots or carbon nanotubes, is done at the lower end of the value chain, and is then sold. Current models of outsourcing, such as the outsourcing of the manufacture of items on the lower end of the value chain (nanomaterials) to countries where labor and production costs are cheap, and the outsourcing of advanced nanotechnology (nanoenabled products) to countries that have considerable scientific expertise, as for example, India, can be adapted to a nanotechnology-enabled world. Another promising area for nanointermediaries is an “actor oriented” perspective, where issues like nanoscience safety are dealt with.

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