Home > Nanotechnology Columns > Alan Shalleck-NanoClarity > The Solution is the Government. Get Stimulus Money to Survive
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Alan Shalleck President NanoClarity LLC |
Abstract:
Everywhere there are signs of economic trouble in the nanotech world. Nanogen goes chapter 11. Arrowhead loses more money. Nanophase changes management. Another nanotech company announces layoffs. A nanotech company tells of retrenchment. The primary strategic issue is where to find resources to survive. Most nanotech executives shrug when asked the question but there is only one possible answer. Swallow your pride as an independent entrepreneur. Go for the government stimulus money! Do it locally and quickly.
May 18th, 2009
The Solution is the Government. Get Stimulus Money to Survive
The Solution is the Government
Get Stimulus Money to Survive
By
Alan B. Shalleck
NanoClarity LLC
May 2009
Everywhere there are signs of economic trouble in the nanotech world. Nanogen goes chapter 11. Arrowhead loses more money. Nanophase changes management. Another nanotech company announces layoffs. A nanotech company tells of retrenchment. The primary strategic issue is where to find resources to survive. Most nanotech executives shrug when asked the question but there is only one possible answer. Swallow your pride as an independent entrepreneur. Go for the government stimulus money! Do it locally and quickly.
I have spent the last two months talking to executives who run nanotechnology companies, or divisions with a nanotechnology focus, to assess the primary trends within the industry and there is not good news. The "industry" (if you can call it that) is stagnant at best; losing big money at worst, and owners, investors, employees and participants are scared.
The one word describing the nanotechnology industry is "struggle". Nanotech companies are burning through their cash reserves very rapidly. The "struggle" is not on the development or cost side but on the commercialization revenue and capital side. 2008-2009 was the targeted year for the sales from nanotech investment to begin to explode, and it just is not happening … at least not at the projected levels of the original NNI business model.
Since few Companies have commercialized their developments enough to sell them to paying customers, the 18 months outlook in this horrible economic environment is bleak. I've been told confidentially by ‘unnamed" directors and VC's that many a nanotech venture board has explored the bankruptcy option and has developed contingency plans for such a worst case scenarios. There are no optimists right now. Nanotech product sales will be a lagging function of any recovery.
But wait … Hi! Yo! Silver! … The Lone Ranger rides again! Here comes the government to the rescue! There is gold out there…pardners… in the stimulus funds…but you just have to work to find it. My analysis shows that there is enough money for most aggressive and creative nanotech venturers to make it successfully across the economic abyss they all face.
Two government initiatives can provide the funding to save the ‘at risk" nanotech venture if that venture's management is prepared to drop temporarily much of its current business
Plan and go for the money … using whatever assets and technologies produced so far and adapting strategies to meet the stimulus targets.
Of these initiatives the best is the ARRA … the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 …. that immense stimulus program Congress passed in February 2009. Nanotechnology is named in the bill as one of the country's economic saving industries. ARRA money is just beginning to make its way into the economic system. Billions of dollars of potential funding for the creative nanotech entrepreneur exist in that stimulus package … available for the taking … that is "for the correctly structured program." Stimulus funds will appear at all the levels (Federal, State or Local). The straegy is to study the contents of the Bill carefully in those areas where your nanotech expertise can make a difference … e.g. building coatings or insulation, bridge and structural steel coatings, window coatings, environmental sensors, all the biological anticancer programs you can create, filters for purifying water and air, technology aimed at better electrical storage or combustion, better catalysts for pollution control, smaller and higher capacity batteries, sensitive medical and DNA diagnostics, new prosthetics for bone and joint repair, etc. and apply your technology to the areas of funding in the Bill. Get out the entire lists of possible applications in Drexler's original writings, or the items listed in the original NNI bill, to find out where you can tailor your technology to those identified products and applications. Nothing has changed since those lists were prepared except there is now a great deal of money to fund those effort … thanks to the Obama stimulus plan.
Look closely at where the technology related money is going: Energy - $45.1 billion: Healthcare - $19.6 billion; R&D - $19.0 billion; Smart Grid - $11 billion; Broadband - $7.2 billion; and Water treatment - $4 billion; Drinking water purification - $2 billion; Construction - $35 billion; and on. Remember the total amount of annual spending for NNI was only about $1 billion! This is a cornucopia of opportunity … and the money is being distributed to all levels … Federal, State and Local levels. It's a flood of near term funding that has to be spent.
Guess what else is exciting? There are not enough "shovel ready" projects in most communities to spend half that amount! States and localities are searching for projects to justify more allocation. Why? Jobs, nanotech executives, jobs. You want stimulus money? Well, you have to plan to hire and train people in your proposals. Go against your management instincts … over hire; do not try to minimize personnel. Put Americans to work in nanotech solutions to the energy, biotech, environmental and all other stimulus plan mentioned areas. Go to it. Sooner rather than later. It is your path across the abyss of the economic disaster that will continue for the next two years.
Alan B. Shalleck
NanoClarity LLC
www.nanoclarity.com
© NanoClarity LLC 2009
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