RTTA 1/2: Nanotechnology Enterprise and Applications

A rooftop solar panel array

One activity of RTTA 1/2 is the creation of a "panel" of nanotechnology corporatations. A corporate panel is a set of companies which have authored or co-authored a nanotechnology publication and/or have a nanotechnology patent. We will use this panel of corporations to track changes in corporate nanotechnology activities over time. The US portion of the corporate panel is comprised of 125 large US nanotechnology companies and 125 small and medium-sized US nanotechnology enterprises (SMEs).

This panel will be used to address research questions such as:

  1. What kinds of linkages do these companies have with universities and other research institutions? 
  2. How is strategy for introduction of nanotechnology-enabled products and materials construed in the face of uncertainty? 
  3. Where do these companies and their products fit in the global supply chain and where is inventive activity geographically located? 
  4. What international boundaries are these supply chains crossing and what role do consumer values and demand play? 
  5. What kinds of employment and training needs and issues do these companies face? and 
  6. How does nanotechnology-related governance and regulation affect the plans and practices of these companies?

A second activity of RTTA 1/2 is conducting patent analysis to characterizing the nature of the nanotechnology activities. The RTTA 1 team uses patent databases constructed with NSF support to calculate patent success rates and measure the complexity of nanotechnology patents. Results from this research indicate that nanotechnology patent applications have a lower success rate than the norm and are more technologically complex than the average patent.

A subset of this activity examines patents classified as “green.” Currently, the RTTA 1 team is preparing a report entitled “How Green is Nano?” Preliminary results indicate that green nanotechnology patents -- in other words, those patents that seek to use nanotechnology as part of an environmentally friendly or sustainable invention -- have the same number of inventors as the average green patent but receive more claims, more citations and more technology codes, suggesting that these patents are substantially more novel than the average green patent.