Abstract
Nanotechnology is supposed to become one of the key enabling technologies of the 21st century. Its economic potential is forecast to be a market of several hundred billion Euros in the next decade. Therefore, nanotechnology has attracted the interest of many industry sectors and many companies redirecting internal activities to prepare themselves for this new challenge. At the same time governmental R&D decision makers all over the world are setting up new nanotechnology-specific research programmes aiming at putting their respective countries in a favourable position for the future. The aim of this paper is to use scientific and technological indicators to make predictions on economic development and to compare the situation in different countries.
Introduction
In the last two decades, nanoscience has made big progress. We have witnessed many important scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs. Exemplary breakthroughs are the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope in 1982 [1] or the discovery of fullerenes in 1985 [2] . A few nanotechnology-based products are already commercially available. However, does actual scientific knowledge justify the world-wide enthusiasm? How likely is it that the worldwide market size will be more than $1 trillion annually in 10-15 years from now [3] ?
Introduction
To evaluate the potential of mature technologies is not easy. For an emerging technology, such as nanotechnology, this task is even more difficult. A forecast, however, can be attempted using a set of indicators that in the past have proven to give good results to predict the potential of other emerging technological fields. The two most obvious indicators are the number of scientific articles and the number of patents. The former is usually a good indicator for scientific activity, the latter for the ability to transform scientific results into applications. Figure 1 shows the evolution of publications and patents in nanotechnology from the beginning of the 1980s up to 1998. The data on the world-wide number of publications in nanotechnology have been extracted from the * The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official European Commission view on the subject.
Introduction
Science Citation Index (SCI) database. The nanopatents are those filed at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich. The EPO patents cover the rights for a large number of countries and are therefore usually more expensive than national patents. In view of the large coverage and the higher cost, it appears reasonable to assume that the inventors are confident that they may exploit the patent commercially. The list of nanoscience-and nanotechnology-related keywords for extracting the publication and patent data, as well as the methodology, is reported elsewhere [4] .
Introduction
Between 1980 and 1985, the number of publications is rather modest, but slightly increasing year by year. From 1986 onwards, an acceleration of the number of publications is visible. This jump can be attributed to the fact that the scanning tunnelling microscope was invented some years before [1] , and started to penetrate as an efficient research tool in academic and industrial research laboratories, favouring research at the nanoscale. The publication rate continues to increase, and additional acceleration peaks can be attributed on one hand to the availability of atomic force microscopes (invented in 1986 [5] ) broadening the range of applicability with respect to STM to non-conductive structures, and on the other hand to significant breakthroughs, such as the discovery of the buckyball molecule C60 in 1985 [2] or carbon nanotubes in 1991 [6] . For the period between 1989 and 1998, the increase in the number of publications is impressive, jumping from 1000 publications to more than 12 000 in 1998. [8] . A similar keyword list, which can be found in the same reference, has been used for retrieving the nanotechnology patent field at the EPO. Note the different scales for the two curves. Sources: SCI, EPO Database (EPAT) and own calculations.
Introduction
The average annual growth rate is 27% and the yearly increase fluctuates from 10 up to 80% per year. Previous data from the US patenting office [7] show a similar evolution to the European data.
Introduction
The number of filed patents is an appropriate indicator to estimate the capacity of the laboratories to transfer their research results into industrial applications. Figure 1 shows the development of the numbers of patents in nanotechnology at the EPO for the same period as the scientific publications. As generally expected, the number of patents follows the pattern of the scientific publications with a certain time delay. Over the whole 1981-98 period, the curve shows a clear increase in the number of patents, from 28 up to 180, with an average growth rate in the 1990s amounting to 7%. This patent curve shows larger fluctuations with respect to the publication data. This is due to the effect that statistical fluctuations have more impact when applied to a smaller number of data. In addition, industrially relevant technological breakthroughs in a specific year have a more significant weight.
Introduction
The evolution of the scientific and technological activity on nanotechnology can be compared with previous enabling technologies. In a first approach a lineal technological development model can be employed. For such a model, which is stylized in figure 2, Grupp [8] has defined eight phases, in which he describes the evolution from basic research to the massive penetration of products. Phase I defines when exploratory scientific work begins. Science continues to make further progress while technology starts to emerge (phase II). In phase III the scientific basics are mostly understood and the first technological prototypes appear. Difficulties at the transformation into commercial applications appear (phase IV) and progress in science and technology seems to stagnate (phase V). Following a reorientation in industrial research new opportunities emerge (phase VI) and commercial applications appear, which mobilize extensive industrial research activities (phase VII). Finally, all markets are penetrated and the volume For an enabling technology, the evolution of scientific activity (publications), technological activity (patenting) and commercialization is sketched as a function of time [8] . Following a theoretical model, the actual situation of nanotechnology would be roughly in development phase II and III.
Introduction
of research diminishes with respect to the production of innovative products (phase VIII). Such a model, based upon publications and patents as indicators, gives good results when used to explain today's mature technologies such as biotechnology or microsystem technology [9] . Comparing both the patent and publication nanotechnology data (figure 1) with the model (figure 2), the field of nanotechnology as a whole appears to be currently at the end of phase II or early phase III. Assuming that the model describes the data correctly, the peak of scientific activity in nanosciences is still to come, possibly in three to five years from now, and large-scale exploitation of nanotechnological results might arise ten years from now. In a first approximation, the curve for nanotechnology (understood as the ensemble of all technologies operating at the nanoscale regime) can be seen as the convolution of a number of nanotechnologies for different purposes, whose timely evolution might change significantly. For example, nanoscale electronic devices are supposed to be a Currently, slightly more than one-quarter of all patents filed are focused on the instrumentation [7] . This supports the view that nanotechnology is at the beginning of the development phase of an enabling technology where the first focus is to develop suitable tools for nanostructuring of surfaces, the production of nanomaterials, the analysis of nano-objects etc. By industrial sectors, the most important ones are information technologies (IT), and pharmaceutics and chemicals. For the first sector, massive storage devices, flat panel displays or electronic paper are prominent IT patenting areas. In addition to this, extended CMOS approaches and alternative nanoscale information processing, transmission or storage devices are also dominant, the reason being the continuous shrinking process of CMOS technology, whichfollowing the semiconductor industry associations and other forecasts [10, 11] -will soon reach the nanometre regime (forecast 22 nm gate length for processors in the year 2011). Being well aware of the apparent problem for the future, the semiconductor industries have already started to investigate solutions towards extending CMOS into the nanoscale as well as novel devices operating at the nanoscale.
Introduction
In the case of chemistry and pharmaceutics, a large number of patents are directed towards finding new approaches for drug delivery, medical diagnostics, cancer treatments etc, which are supposed to become huge future markets. Nanotechnology patenting for other sectors, such as aerospace, construction industries, food processing, automotive, oil refining, environmental monitoring etc shows yearly increasing values, but their absolute numbers are smaller with respect to the areas discussed above (instrumentation, IT, and pharmaceutics and medicine).
The world-wide actors
Most countries have activities in nanoscale science and technology. The 15 most active countries in terms of publications and patents are given in table 1. The publications, recorded for the period 1997-99, are divided by the country of their authors' affiliations. The data for the patents cover a larger period, namely from 1991 to 1999, and include the EPO patents as well as those of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). The PCT patents are filed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva and can afterwards be transferred to any national patent office in the world or to the EPO. Double-counts between PCT and EPO patents are eliminated. The additional analysis of the international PCT patents reduces distortions due to the bias of the number of EPO patents towards Europe. In addition, the higher number of analysed patents improves the statistical reliability to compare countries.
The world-wide actors
The most active country in nanoscale research is the United States, with roughly one-quarter of all publications, followed by Japan, Germany, China, France, the United Kingdom and Russia. These first seven countries alone account for nearly 70% of the world's scientific papers on nanotechnology. All EU member states and most EU candidate countries (except Luxembourg where there is no university) are among the top 50 (not shown here). The shares for China and Russia are outstanding in comparison with their general presence in the SCI database and show the relatively strong significance of nanoscience in their research systems. The same table shows the number of patents at the EPO by country. A comparison of the most active countries in publications with those of patents shows that most of the first 15 countries are in common. However, the spread between the countries is significantly larger. Note that the first country (US) publishes 16.9 times as much as the fifteenth (Sweden), but files 84 times more patents (US with respect to Spain).
The world-wide actors
The absolute values of publications and patents, however, are not the most appropriate way to measure the effectiveness of the countries. For this purpose, the data need to be normalized. There are many possible methods for such a 'normalization', for example by the gross national product, GNP per capita, the country's investment in research etc. Unfortunately, none of them is without complications. For example a normalization by the country's research investment is difficult as usually only the governmental spending is publicly available. Table 2 . Publications and patent ranking normalized by size of country for the 15 most effective countries. The period for publications in nanotechnology comprises of the years between 1997 and 1999. In the case of patents registered at the EPO and PCT, the period from 1991 to 1999 is taken, due to the fact that the absolute numbers of patents per year are small and may be distorted. The population data are taken from the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) data for mid-2001. Sources: SCI, EPAT, PCTPAT, PRB and own calculations. The financial effort from industry is to a large extent not published; however, the industrial research effort is generally more prone to deliver patents. In spite of the difficulties of finding a good normalization factor, we can assume that, in a first-order approximation, the efficiency and productivity of countries can be depicted by dividing the number of publications by the country's population. Based on the previous table, table 2 lists the 15 most productive countries per million inhabitants. In this ranking, Switzerland comes out top. This is not astonishing, as since the invention of the STM at the IBM Zurich laboratories, Switzerland has maintained a long tradition in nanotechnology research. Many world-class laboratories exist, and the Swiss government has played an active role in promoting nanotechnology through different specific programmes. The high value in the table may be partially distorted by the fact that the international CERN institutes appear in the database research as Swiss. However, even removing CERN from the data, Switzerland would still remain at the top of the list. Israel, another ten European states, Singapore, Japan and the USA complete the rest of the first 15 countries for publications. Most of these countries find themselves also in the list of the most efficient ones for patent filing. As already observed in the table for the absolute values, the spread between the most effective countries for patenting is roughly ten times larger (12.2-0.3) than for publications (150.2-36.0). This indicates a larger capacity to transfer research results into potential applications for some countries with respect to others. The USA is an exemplary case, it is only in position 14 in terms of publications per million inhabitants (39.2), but climbs to position number 6 for EPO&PCT patents per inhabitants (3.5). Such a large divergence between the ranking in normalized publications and patents may be explained by close academia-industry collaborations and by cultural influences (for example, additional financial incentives for academic personnel). China, which is the fourth most active country in absolute publications (6.3% share of the world-wide value, table 1), disappears in the normalized table (with less than 0.01 publications per million inhabitants) due to its huge population. Russia does not appear in the normalized tables as it occupies place 18 for both publications and patenting (with values of 15.0 publications per million inhabitants and 0.16 patents per million inhabitants) 1 .
Conclusions
Science and technology indicators can give insights into the stage of maturity of a given technology and may be used to depict scenarios for future evolution and for decision makers to design an appropriate strategy. Nanotechnology-as a whole-is still an emerging area with the need to make progress in both scientific and technological terms before massive commercialization of products may occur. Some nanotechnology-based products are already on the market and others will follow. A forecast of which will be the most promising application to reach the market would require a more detailed analysis of the nanotechnology indicators by the industrial sector and by nanotechnology sub-areas. Such a prediction based on indicators is currently difficult to carry out due to the fact that nanotechnology is still an emerging area, and due to its cross-cutting nature it is difficult to make assignments to a sectorial or industrial branch. An indicator analysis of nanotechnology activity by country confirms that the scientific expertise is not evenly distributed across the industrial countries, and that for countries with similar scientific potential some of them are more capable of transferring research results into application and, finally, into industrial products.

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