Nanotechnology Enterprise

Nanotechnology enterprise refers to the ongoing collective activity in the nanoscience fields, within universities, the private sector, and in government laboratories. In many contexts, it refers specifically to private industry, as when speaking of a country's nanotechnology enterprise sector. Rather than one science, nanoscience encompasses, engages, and borrows from biology, engineering, materials science, physics, chemistry, computer science, and even communications and cognitive science.

Nanotechnology, likewise, includes—in a sense—every existing type of technology at the nanoscale, though in practice not every technology is useful or interesting at that scale. The six main nanotechnology fields are nanomaterials, nanobiotechnology, nanosoftware, nanophotonics, nanoelectronics, and nanoinstrumentation. The last three have received the greatest amount of investment, while nanomaterials is the pursuit of the greatest number of companies, developing processes to manufacture nanomaterials and finding commercial applications for them. Most of these nanomaterials will find their way into products the consumers who will likely have no idea the product contains nanomaterials. The technology will be used for scratch-resistant surfaces, greater conductivity, better temperature insulation, better resistance to the wear and tear of friction, or simply to strengthen an already common material, as in the use of carbon black to make stronger tires.

Nanoscience and nanotechnology essentially date, in concept if not terminology, from physicist Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture, “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” given to the American Physical Society at Caltech. Feynman's remarks addressed not only the possibility of smaller and denser computer circuitry, but the scaling issues that would later be pertinent in the use of nanoparticles and nanoscale components. His focus was on the various possibilities offered by the direct manipulation of atoms and molecular self-assembly, and anticipated the developments of probe microscopy. In the following decade, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that each generation of transistor technology would shrink at such a rate that the number of transistors that could fit in a circuit board would double rapidly (he originally predicted annually, and later revised this to every two years). Though Moore did not focus on the nanoscale—it would be a few decades before that doubling would imply transistors at that size—this was an early example of the intersection between business, engineering, and the science of “getting small.”