Time to think small

IW: Why did you see a need for this new organization?

MM: We now have a field of technology that is really going to work across a variety of areas. Some would say it’s going to touch most aspects of our lives. And you have something that’s coming out of university labs and out of government research labs, so there are a lot of technology transfer issues involved. There are issues for researchers trying to be first-time entrepreneurs, which we all know isn’t necessarily easy. And you also have a tech community, especially on the finance side, that’s not used to dealing with a university that might own 60 percent of a patent. What we really try to do is bring together the pieces that are coming together in this industry across researchers, startups, universities, government officials, venture capitalists, and corporations. We want to start to get a dialogue going as to what the industry’s going to need to get bigger [and] quicker.

IW: How is what’s happening in this space similar to other disruptive technologies that have come down the pike?

DH: From my perspective, this sounds familiar. It’s the same kind of opening up of the Wild West that happened when some of the DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] transfers started happening a decade or so ago. It started off ill-defined and had some far-out, science fictiony concepts. But it’s more interesting [now] because it’s not all mucked up with legal issues and it’s ground-breaking territory with a lot of promise.

IW: Where does nanotechnology manifest itself today?

MM: The very definition of nanotechnology is still open today, even among researchers and certainly the venture [capital] community. There is a passive use of a lot of the technologies right now. We’re talking about the ability to move things around at a scale of atoms and molecules. It’s already a billion-dollar industry in the sense it’s being used in the material sciences. You have it being used as hardening agents in paints that are going on the Navy battleships and composite materials that are already making their way into the IT field.

DH: And then you can look at pharmaceuticals or biotech and a couple of people have told me they’re using nanotechnology to simplify molecular design for new pharmaceuticals. And by re-creating more simplistic geometric shapes, they reduce the numbers of variables that calculate, that determine what the efficacy is of any particular pharmaceutical.

IW: So what comes next in this space?

DH: Manufacturing using nanotechnology doesn’t have the defects created by the normal manufacturing process, where you have seams or welds or anything like that. Also, you’ve got things like quantum computing, which IBM and a lot of companies have been touting. The reason that people would do this is just to keep Moore’s Law ticking on forever and avoid heat buildup.

MM: If you think about how most semiconductor designs are set up now, they’re essentially two-dimensional. Nanotechnology would allow the extrusion capability to where you could start building up three-dimensional layers of storage devices which, if you imagine all the power you get out of a chip, that chip as extended into a third dimension. Obviously, you get an exponential increase in speed and capacity.

IW: At the end of the day, what will be the biggest impact of all this?

DH: This is going to be a real game-changer, because you can do so much with limited resources. It takes away the home field advantage of having huge beds of natural resources in your country. You can create almost anything you want to with very limited resources. That’s going to have to create some kind of a shift in world power as this technology continues.