Graphene Market Development - The Promise and the Path (The Graphene Council Newsletter April 2014)
Of the numerous proposed applications for Graphene, opportunities for commercialisation have been looked at for both new market applications and pre-existing markets, with a focus on the latter. While time-to-market for new, niche, high-value/low-volume use of Graphene (and other nanomaterials) in itself presents a myriad of challenges for producers, targeting graphene as a replacement to existing material sectors in the near term also poses immense challenges.
Engineering and broadening the scope for industry demand in nanomaterials
"We've got the solution, now we're looking for the problem". Inventors that develop new and novel materials frequently find that half the battle is in applying their discoveries in innovative and creative ways to generate value.
Nanotechnology - Moving beyond the hype
Despite significant scientific progress in the field of nanotechnology in the last few decades, currently the most formidable displays of the power of nanoscale processes are performed by nature not artificially and exist inside every single one of us, such as the autonomous replication of the genome and the construction and self-assembly of protein from base amino acids.
Achieving industry integration with nanomaterials through financial markets
Much research has been done on the synthesis and characterisation of nanomaterials but comparatively less effort has been spent in building a viable and sustainable route into the commercialising of nanomaterials. It has been noted that a growing number of entrants to the market are university spin outs and the largest difficulty these companies typically face is prioritising development objectives and alliance building, owing to the limited time and financial resources that SMEs have (Lubik and Garnsey, 2008). The practical considerations for choosing the most efficient routes to market and achieving business growth will be the focus for this column.