Nanotechnology promises to be a leading source of high-technology manufacturing jobs in the 21st century and has been the target of approximately $7 billion in federal funding. Leadership in its commercialization is critical for maintaining American Competitiveness and seeing an economic return on federal investment. This proposal is for an exploratory project to create a sustainable methodology and set of metrics to quantify the impact of NSF's nanoscience and engineering spending on nanotechnology commercialization. The project will study three NSF-funded grant programs, NSEC, MRSEC and NIRT and two NSF-funded networks, NCN and NNIN. The project will develop metrics for and measure five key areas of commercial impact, fundamental research, translation of research to industry, collaboration with established industry, workforce development and public education. The project will also record observations on best practices for and challenges to commercialization.
If successful, the project will improve awareness of commercialization potential within the studied programs and help the NSF better structure future programs. This project will produce a comprehensive set of metrics which can be used to track the commercial impact of Federally funded science programs in the future. It will produce a report that will highlight successful commercialization practices in a given program that can be adopted by others and also highlight commercialization challenges which new programs might face. The project will illuminate the current state of commercialization for the studied programs and allow NSF to set goals for commercial impact and to better channel spending.
