توزیع جهانی از مراکز فن آوری و ساخت میکرو نانو: یک روش تجزیه و تحلیل سبد سرمابه گذاری

Micro and Nano Technologies (MNT) are potential economic engines that have the capability to become the basis for regional and national job and wealth creation. Some have even suggested that MNT along with information technology and media form the basis of a new Schumpeterian or Kondratief wave. Many governments recognizing MNT as enabling technologies with exceptional economic potential have embraced them as centerpieces of their technology policy. Many of these same countries and regions as an expression of their technology policy are creating national centers that embrace the promise of MNT. These international Micro and Nano Technology Centers (MNTC) have taken a variety of forms. Here we review the variety of forms and define the nature of many these major MNTCs from around the world by describing some of their similarities and differences. We provide an insight into many of these centers' demonstrated policy and tactics as they optimize their value to their constituents. Finally we provide a contribution to the literature by providing a categorization scheme for global MNTCs based on our exploration.

If micro and nano technology (MNT) is the harbinger of the next Schumpeterian [1] or Kondratief [2] wave and if MNT act like the previous technology platforms that laid the foundation of these waves, then those regions that accelerate their adoption will differentially benefit from that choice. The countries and regions that not only recognize MNT as an element of this nascent Schumpeterian wave and proactively develop a policy that forms the basis for its advancement provide their regions with the best opportunity for future national and regional job and wealth creation based on MNT. This makes regional and national technology policy strategy and tactics critical to that effort [3]. One of the earliest outputs of many MNT national and regional technology policies is the development of MNT centers (MNTC). Here we seek to gain and present an understanding of the variety of forms that emerging MNTCs have taken through the use of a survey instrument. We provide results of our study dedicated to the evaluation of global MNTCs. The authors identified and contacted eighty (80) such centers of global importance. We received responses from thirty five (35) centers representing worldwide regions Asia/Pacific, Europe and North America. These three regions include governments whose technology policy has generated the largest and most historic funding efforts in the MNT field [4]. Today with the ever-increasing hype centered on MNT, governments, corporations and regions are rushing to initiate MNT programs and centers of excellence [5] and [6]. Yet to date few academic efforts have been undertaken to understand the phenomena. Here we provide the first such work. This study relates these centers' choice of a comprehensive set of technologies and how they relate to various application areas and industrial sectors. These centers provide us an identification pathway through their choices of policy makers' technological and industrial hot spots. The strategic choices that these MNT centers have made for example demonstrate little or no cultural differences in centers' choice of industry or technology regardless of their location in the world. Nevertheless there are remarkable differences between individual centers. These include the technologies they consider as MNT, their aims, type or way in which they sustain themselves. Here we try to illustrate these differences and provide the reader with a background to these MNTC strategic focuses.

We have presented first results of a still ongoing study on global micro–nano centers (MNTC). First, MNT as pursued by specific centers is focused more on research than on commercial application. Even when industry is the mainly addressed customer of MNTCs, the main activity within the scope of the center is scientific and technological research. Second, we have identified technologies that are shared by a majority of MNTCs . We also have identified technologies that do not seem to be of high relevance to the field of micro–nano technology. Third, we have identified industrial sectors with high as well as remarkable low affinity to nano–micro technology. We have also provided a classification scheme for MNT based on the objective function of strategy. These preliminary results lead to some interesting questions regarding complexity of tasks within MNT R and D centers vs. MNT industry-like centers. We are interested in further research, which investigates the role of scientific oriented centers versus manufacturing and infrastructure centers (i. e. industry-oriented). We are further investigating if the technologies made available in manufacturing and infrastructure centers in general tend to be more mature (in terms of reproducibility, standardization or the like) than those used for scientific purposes. We are investigating other methods to understand the differing technologies and their interface with other technologies and how they might be differently applied to differing industry problems. Our data also raises other questions which need to be investigated. These include quires such as: Do industry-oriented centers (like infrastructure centers) represent a mainly permanent organization with a portfolio that – due to the service aspect of these centers – has to be presented to the customers? Finally we need to increase the size of our sample of centers and to include newly emerging MNTCs.