WASHINGTON, July 12, 2002 — Small tech industry sources say the federal government’s new emphasis on converging technologies is timely because the field is ripe for commercialization.
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Commerce this week published a study that examines how convergence of nanotechnology with other sciences can help improve human performance.
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The study identifies areas such as work efficiency and learning, health care, human-machine interfaces for industrial and personal use and enhanced human capabilities for national defense as fields that will benefit from increased research.
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Mike Roco, director of the federal government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative, was instrumental in the study’s development. He said he expects convergence to become the recipient of significant research dollars.
“Convergence is where the United States has an edge over all of the other countries doing concentrated work in information technology or the life sciences,” said Richard Helfrich, managing director of Alameda Capital LLC, a venture capital fund focused on convergence technologies. “We have the greatest wealth of people coming through the universities and the national laboratories starting to do work in the convergence area.”
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Alameda began focusing on nanotechnology investments when it started about nine months ago, but discovered that “a lot of the good nano deals were good convergence deals,” Helfrich said. The company stuck with nanotechnology, but has broadened the target to include convergence in general. Nanofilms and nanoparticles, he said, are frequently part of a convergence deal.
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There is no firm definition of “convergence market,” Helfrich said. Most of the companies Alameda is looking at involve nanotechnology and as many as four other disciplines.
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The NSF study explicitly examines the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Roco said he did not think there were any companies now knitting together all of these fields into a single product, but he predicted in five years such companies will be common.
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But plenty of companies, especially in nanotechnology, do juggle several different sciences. Venture capitalists toiling in the field are scarcer. “We’re trying to find other VCs to syndicate with, and we haven’t had any luck,” Helfrich said. “This stuff is harder than rocket science. Good deals are being overlooked because it’s tough. You’ve got all of these complex technologies, and they all overlap.”
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Alameda is still raising money. The company should close its fund within the next three months, Helfrich said. He declined to identify any deals or companies Alameda is considering funding, although he did say the company is interested in biological and chemical sensors, which involve nanotechnology and semiconductor, biological and chemical sciences.
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It’s not particularly hard to get the scientists to work together, said Gray Hancock, senior development manager at the Houston Technology Center, a nonprofit organization that helps early-stage companies grow.
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But getting the businesspeople and the scientists to collaborate can be tough.
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“The motivations are very different,” he said. “In the academic world you can bring scientists together and they all are motivated by the same thing — publication, academic prestige. They all work in that world. But when you bring in a manager, the motivation becomes return on investment and so it’s much harder to relate.”
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Indeed, communication is vital in complex deals that involved converging technologies, said Bob Davis, chief executive of C Sixty Inc., a Houston bio-nano company.
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The company has a wide range of research agreements and partnerships around the country. “You’ve got to have a concept most people will buy into,” he said. “If everybody is doing their own thing, you’re going to get spaghetti.”
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Getting funding is a major hurdle for companies working on multidisciplinary, complex research and development, he said.
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James Spohrer, director of technology at IBM’s Venture Capital Relations Group, said companies and researchers involved with technology should care about the federal government’s interest in convergence because “there will be unique things that are possible if you can manage the multidisciplinary teams, things that we will be able to do that create investment opportunities. The NSF would be a feeder for that.”
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The focus of the research, Roco said, will be on the human being — on improving the quality of life of people, be it through medicine or group communications, national defense or sensory enhancement. It will explicitly not focus on making machines more like humans, a field with alarming social and philosophical implications. Instead, it will use machines and technology to improve human minds and bodies.
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“What we are looking at is now most of the disciplines are collapsing in a continuum,” he said. “Five hundred years ago, in the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci had such kinds of ideas but they were not sustained. The disciplines separated one by one, because there was not coherence at the nanoscale. So now we have the means.”