NanoInnovation: What Every Manager Needs to Know

2A Quick-Start Guide: 10 Things You Should Know About Nanoinnovation

Micro-this, micro-that—how much difference can there be between one kind of tiny thing and another? The answer, of course, is “almost everything.”

– K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

In Chapter 1, I challenged you to “name something nano.” In this chapter I challenge you to “learn something nano.” This quick-start chapter is designed to help you understand the core essentials of nanoinnovation – including the core principles, properties, scale, industry metrics, jargon, history, and critical issues that you as a manager need to know. This will help prepare you by giving you a grounding in some of the “nano essentials” before drilling down to explore the science and technology that is generating specific products and applications.

Let's start by looking at some of the questions and issues that differentiate nanoinnovation from nanotechnology.

In the field of innovation, everyone talks about getting “out of the box” (Figure 2.1) Nanoinnovation not only gets you out of the box but it also disassembles the box into atoms and molecules. So let's extend this metaphor. Imagine a box. Inside this box is something we call nanotechnology. In the box, the technology is restricted by boundaries. Some of these boundaries are physical, some are mental. Others are contextual. Some involve financial or technical constraints, or various types of resource limitations. ...