Alain Kaloyeros, the CEO of the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Albany, writes at the Post-Standard that nanotech is the "moonshot" of the 21st century. He argues that nanotech will have applications touching medicine, energy, and defense:
Just as importantly, the emergence of nanotechnology is creating a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for economic prosperity. Amid projections by Global Industry Analysts Inc. that nanotechnology will be a $2.4 trillion industry by 2015, it is the regions, states and countries that lead in this pioneering field that will reap its financial rewards. It is in this arena that New York holds a global competitive advantage, by virtue of a groundbreaking and successful nanotechnology paradigm that embodies JFK’s view that “all of us must work together.” Public-private partnerships, combining government, academia and industry, are being deployed across New York to elevate education, accelerate innovation, create high-tech employment, and generate economic growth.
R&D round up
Matt Daneman at the Democrat and Chronicle has a piece about the "seed corn" of tech companies: research and development. He's rounded up expenditures at local companies, including declining investments at Kodak and Xerox, and rising spending at CooperVision and Harris:
While some economists have raised concerns about what appears to be a trend of declining R&D spending by corporations, others assert that the drop is the result of managing costs better, said John Ettlie, professor of decision sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology's Saunders College of Business. "It's not how much you spend on R&D, it's how you spend it," Ettlie said. "How those resources are managed." One way of managing costs has been a greater investment in doing R&D overseas, he said. Today, U.S. industrial companies spend about 25 percent of their budget abroad, up from perhaps 5 percent just a decade ago, Ettlie said.
NYSTAR cash
The state agency that funds start-ups, NYSTAR, has gotten $1.3 million in federal funding to create manufacturing jobs, reports Eric Reinhardt at the Greater Binghamton Business Journal. There's no word on how the money would be affected by a proposed merger of NYSTAR and Empire State Development, as proposed in the governor's budget.
Bruce Holm
Several papers are remembering Bruce Holm, senior vice provost at the University at Buffalo, who has died after a struggle with kidney cancer. Patti Singer at the Democrat and Chronicle writes:
Mr. Holm bridged the worlds of research, business and politics. In 2004, he was appointed executive director of UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. Satish Tripathi, UB provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said in a statement that Mr. Holm was the quintessential "scholar-entrepreneur."
And Ellen Goldbaum writes at the UB Reporter:
Holm’s career was marked by numerous achievements, both in his administrative endeavors at UB and in translational research that moved from the lab bench to the bedside in the form of a life-saving drug for premature infants that he co-developed with colleagues.
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