Uri Sagman

Co-Founder and Executive Director, Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance

Dr. Sagman is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance, an association dedicated to the promotion of the nanotechnology sector in Canada. The Canadian NanoBusiness Alliance has a diverse membership, which includes representation of government agencies, academic centers of excellence, industry and the investment community. Dr. Sagman is cofounder and director of C Sixty Inc. At C Sixty, Dr. Sagman has recruited some of the world’s leading scientists, including the 1996 Nobel Prize awardee and co-discoverer of fullerenes, to advance the development of fullerene-based technology for biomedical applications. To that end, Dr. Sagman has enlisted a comprehensive R&D network, based at leading academic centers, which include Rice University, UCLA, Columbia University, Dartmouth University, the University of Toronto, Erlangen University in Germany, and the University of Taiwan. Dr. Sagman is the Chairman of GRN Health International Inc., a globally based academic research organization dedicated to medical research and development.

Dr. Sagman is currently engaged in the development of strategies for National Nanotechnology Initiative programs in several countries, specializing in the development of paradigms for public and private sector alliances. In addition, Dr. Sagman’s efforts are focused on the application of nanotechnology to problems of global scope.

Dr. Sagman is a medical oncologist, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and a fellowship recipient of the Medical Research Council of Canada. He is a recognized researcher in the field of clinical oncology, tumor biology and immunology. Dr. Sagman obtained his training at McGill University, The University of Calgary, The University of Toronto and Oxford University. Dr. Sagman is the recipient of numerous awards and citations including the Young Investigator awards of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He has organized and participated as keynote speaker at numerous nanotechnology-based conferences. Dr. Sagman has been extensively profiled in numerous journal and press publications, including Time Magazine, Newsweek, the Economist, the New York Times, Red Herring, Technology Review, Chemical Engineering, the National Post, the Houston Chronicle, and The Toronto Star amongst others.

The Commerce of Scientific Innovation - A Nano-Economic Roadmap

Scientific innovation and its derivative benefits have had profound implications to humanity within the last century. Heralded by present and future understandings of integrated molecular systems, nanotechnology is likely to lead to scientific innovations that will likewise bear profound changes for humanity this century, and more likely than not at a much more rapid pace than earlier conceived.

Nanotechnology will affect almost every market either directly or indirectly. In some cases, markets will be disrupted; however, in many cases nanotechnology can be seen as a way of making incremental changes to existing markets or enabling the creation of new markets. The nanotechnology space, to be certain, is a teaming collection of technologies and applications seeking each other. The technologies are the building blocks that will change the dynamics and cost structure of product sectors that exist today and those that will be created.

There are many powerful drivers behind nanotechnology. There is an unprecedented scale of government funding, backed by equivalent corporate R&D funding, and a rapidly growing amount of investment capital. Equally, the convergence of traditionally separate scientific disciplines that nanotechnology represents is proving enormously fertile. This can be combined with the fact that nanotechnology is advancing on numerous fronts simultaneously, often competing in the same space, to present a future of remarkable volatility, in which new industries will be born, old industries may collapse, and market players will be confronted with multitude of opportunities.

A remarkable characteristic of the nanotechnology sector is its complex structure. Funders (public and private), large companies, subsidiaries and joint ventures, universities, research organizations, small companies and startups are starting to interact in nontraditional ways. Large companies that seek opportunities for existing applications cooperate much more with university spin-offs and invest in companies outside their normal area of expertise because they recognize that boundaries are being eroded. In turn, startups create intricate networks of licensing agreements with major and minor players.

A handful of countries dominate activity in the nanotechnology sector having enlisted entry into the nanospace in different ways. In the US, for example, many nanotechnology companies exist as a result of applying high precision manufacturing and metrology to the semiconductor industry, while European dominance is as a result of existing chemical and material producers.

While it is inevitable, as with all new technologies, that most benefits will go to advanced industrialized nations there are benefits that could be global. In the latter category are developments in energy production, distribution, and storage, and the potential of nanotechnology to dominate solutions for water stress globally.

To be sure, an intricate economic paradigm is being forged entailing a roadmap where: (1) large organizations, with the resources to investigate long-term technologies seek applications of nanotechnologies to improve margins, lower costs or increase market share, (2) startups, seek to apply technologies in order to capture market share or disrupt existing markets, attract the attention of acquisition-hungry incumbents, (3) economic blocks compete for supremacy, mindful of the economic benefits that strength in many of the applications of nanotechnology will bring, and (4) public agencies attempts to capture the maximum number of links in the value chain. What is clear is that scientific innovation remains the currency for the creation of this new economic order.