NCMS releases study on nanotechnology in industry

The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a final report titled “2005 NCMS Survey of Nanotechnology in the U.S. Manufacturing Industry”. The study, conducted under NSF sponsorship, documents the nation’s largest cross-industry survey of nanotechnology applications being commercialized by the U.S. manufacturing industry. The report is available at: http://www.ncms.org or http://www.nsf.gov/nano/.

Nearly 600 U.S. industry executives participated in the online NCMS-developed survey, providing insights on strategic issues affecting their organizations’ pursuit of nanotechnology, that included management views, adequacy of research infrastructure, commercialization readiness and a ranking of key barriers. The study compares these industry trends across U.S. regions, and provides information useful in planning corporate strategy, government policy and public investments to stimulate the largely small business-dominated nanotechnology industry, and help maintain the nation’s lead.

“The survey shows the increased significance of nanotechnology to both traditional and emerging fields in the last five years. In 2000, one could identify only a handful of companies with nanotechnology programs. In 2005, 18 percent of the surveyed industries are already marketing products, about 80 percent expect to commercialize nano-products by 2010, and almost everyone expressed confidence their organizations will be involved with nanotechnology in the future after 2010. Such expansion of industrial relevance has been a goal of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI),” said M.C. Roco, key architect of the NNI, and senior advisor for nanotechnology at NSF.

“While applications of two-dimensional nanotechnology products such as coatings, nano-particulates and thin films will proliferate in the near-term across many major industry sectors, the surveyed executives indicated close consensus that the key barriers to commercialization of more complex, three-dimensional nanotechnology products relate to process scalability, financing and regulatory issues,” said NCMS principal investigator Manish Mehta. “These challenges require concerted and innovative, public-private collaborations with unprecedented knowledge-sharing to overcome so as to reap the visionary benefits.”

NCMS is the largest cross-industry collaborative R&D consortium in North America devoted exclusively to manufacturing technologies, processes and practices. It has 20 years of experience in the formation of complex, multi-partner collaborative programs, and is backed by members representing virtually every sector of the manufacturing community.

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