If you think that investing in nanotechnology is a quick, easy road to riches you're wrong. Nanotechnology will create a lot of new wealth and it will destroy a lot of old wealth but it will not, as a general rule, do these things overnight. Rather, it will do so over a period of years and, accordingly, investors of nanotechnology will need to demonstrate some patience.
—Jack Uldrich, President, The NanoVeritas Group
Author of the award-winning, bestseller, The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business

NN: Who are the major players in the emerging nanotechnology space? What differentiates them from those that we wouldn't consider major players?

That's a great question. Let me answer it this way: there are the big companies, the startups, and the companies that nobody has ever heard of, which may be big or small.

There is a really interesting space here regarding what the big companies are doing, especially diversified companies like 3M and GE. I'll focus on automobile companies; in one of our reports, we talked about nanotech's impact on a consumer truck. For example, if you looked at a very specific case study on a Ford F-Series truck, what would you see in terms of nanotech's ability to add value? We took six emerging nanotech innovations, and applied them to one model year of this high-volume truck. This took into account that there were tier one suppliers and other OEM suppliers. We looked at who's going to win the most. If you looked at tier one suppliers to the auto manufacturer, they would win the most, with a $493M incremental increase in revenue for the year that nanotechnology innovations were implemented. Consumers would be ranked second, and they would see $327M in cost savings over five years of usage of the truck. How would they do that? It would be through better fuel economy, as well as soft benefits in performance and savings. The truck manufacturer itself would follow with a net $248M in cost savings and boosted resale value, plus points of differentiation against competitors. The other notable winner is the environment; we estimated 10% less fuel consumed and a 30% drop in emissions, and the use of recyclable plastics. There are also other manufacturing gains, such as the 19M gallons of water saved annually.
—David Lackner, Senior Analyst for Lux Research.