Over the past two months, CEA/Leti in France, the government of Bulgaria and a consortium of universities in Poland have all made commitments and investments to a new field of research known as nanotechnology.

Actually, it is quite strange that one would call a something a  “science” after simply based on its size or dimension.  But when you get down to the level of 1000 or less molecules (10,000 times smaller than the thickness of human hair) that should perform a certain function, it becomes the research of very small structures, that behave differently from larger systems of the same material – hence the word nanotechnology. For example, gold looks and behaves very different when it is only a few molecules in size.  For example, it melts at much lower temperatures and its color is oddly red and not that brilliant yellow that we all have come to appreciate.

Adding to the string of recent current news, next week here in Zurich we will lay the foundation stone for our new nanotechnology lab with ETH.   Which begs the question, why all the buzz about nanotechnology recently? On top of all the doom and gloom in the press, why are governments, universities and corporations investing in this science?

In one word, opportunity.  There are all kinds of statistics to point to, such as the analysts of Credit Suisse who estimate the growth rate for nanotechnology to be 25 to 30% per year with a market size of $220 billion by 2010. Or Lux Research, who say that nanotechnology will impact $2.9 trillion worth of products across the value chain by 2014.  If you will, stats are just predictions, and as an engineer I prefer hard facts.

When I think about the future promise of nanotechnology I don’t need charts to see the opportunity, working at a Lab I can see it first hand.  While nanotechnology is already making its way into common products from lipstick to the paint on a car, here in Zurich we are taking it further, much further:  for example, we work on atomic switches, where single electrons decide over whether the switch is open or closed. These projects are important for the future of our industry, that will soon face the challenge, that Moore’s law of doubling the number of transistors every 18 months on a conventional CMOS chip no longer can be maintained.

One of the favorite podcasts I listen to, when I walk our dog at night or on the weekend is the BBC´s Business Daily. Recently they had a very interesting feature on behavioral economics in which Dan Ariely, a professor at MIT, explained some of the irrational behaviors we demonstrate vis-a-vis money.

My dog Siba

It became very clear that it is a better strategy to make employees happy by subsidizing their daily meals rather than paying the commensurate amount as part of their monthly salary.

The approach of companies that offer their employees even free meals has the added benefit that people don´t even think to leave the office in search for cheaper meals and instead continue work related discussion even during their breaks.

At the Zurich Research Lab, I have found that our famous morning coffee break is one of those occasions. While the coffee is not entirely free, people still sit together and discuss work related matters. Countless ideas for new patents, research and experiments were hatched out in our cafeteria during the last 53 years.

One of the interesting things about the SAP IRF is that it is moderated by two professionals, Dan Woods, a technical writer/thinker and Mark Jeffries, an expert in communication and soft skills. Dan is responsible for the content, Mark is responsible for the flow.

Through meeting Mark, I became aware of his book “What’s up with your handshake?” where he talks about the required soft skills to win. I have started reading it now and in-deed, while he states many obvious things, we all seem to forget about these and stumble over our own feet . A definite recommendation not only for executives but everyone else as well.

June 25, 2008 IBM and ETH Zurich announced a “groundbreaking” partnership in the field of nanotechnology.  I put “groundbreaking” in quotes, because we are actually constructing a brand new lab here in Rüschlikon, Switzerland to house the research, which will range from exploratory and basic research to applied and near-term projects.

To document the construction of the building, we’ve installed a 5 mega-pixel camera on the roof of the Zurich Lab to take photos as the building is constructed.   And now you can see what many of us see outside of our windows every day.  Here is the link to the photos.  It will refresh every 15 minutes.  Check back on our progress as we prepare to open the lab in 2011.

We are also looking for additional partners to collaborate with, so if you are interested please contact us at communications AT zurich.ibm.com.

Last week I had the privilege to attend SAP Research’s International Research Forum (IRF) in Dresden. The IRF, which took place for the fourth time, is an annual  global brain-storming event where SAP bring together industrial and academic partners from all over the world to discuss and debate (in a friendly way) topics of interest to SAP (Research) and their clients (which pretty much are all businesses big enough to care about automating their back- and
front-office).

This years event was dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT). We were asked to define what this might mean, when and if it would happen, who needs to do what to make it happen and how we knew it had happened .

We tried to identify potential “killer applications” – I hate that word – that would justify the investments and make somebody really rich. I don’t believe we came up with a single answer here, however we agreed that the energy business (and environment) would be first be impacted by IoT as government and private enterprise are most likely to invest there.

We learned from Prof. Dr. Janet Wesson, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. that the utilities in South Africa have started to equip homes with smart meters to turn off geysers (boilers for those of us who speak US English) when the load in the grid is getting too high. She explained that the utilities for more than ten years had not invested in maintenance of power plants and construction of new power plants, therefore this idea was born out of sheer necessity to deal quickly with the energy crisis.

A lot of technology for IoT already exists, however when it comes to wireless sensors and actuators scalability, reliability and energy consumption are still largely unsolved problems. When you think of an sensor solution with thousands of sensors, some of these are bound to be faulty and will either return wrong readings or no information. Do we understand how to deal with such faults at the application level?

Prof. Dr. Hubert Österle, Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen  gave a simple example of his home alarm system that had had numerous mal-functions because of faulty sensors. It became clear that IoT solutions needed to work and provide a good user experience otherwise they might never become adopted or used. Here in my opinion lies a huge challenge. For example, low power reliable wireless communication is still not solved. Just think of the difficulty of pairing two bluetooth devices. My car has one of those bluetooth enabled systems to allow hands-free phone calls. In 20% of the cases it seems to forget that it had paired with my phone and I need to redo that step once more.  Scalable Zig-Bee communication also has not been solved, I hear of cases where with systems of more than 60 sensors, the communication just breaks down. We have a research project on that topic, Mote Runner – I’ll be curious to see how far we can push the technology.

Another observation was that IoT solutions are mostly very interdisciplinary and more often than not have complex business cases as a lot more stake holders are involved.

A simple example is to optimize production at a chemical plant while also minimizing its energy consumption. There is an obvious business case that has an immediate ROI. However as the electricity is being paid for by a different organization in the enterprise from that running the plant, such a project would need to be sold as a strategic change project to the CEO rather than the production or real-estate manager. IBM observes the same when we talk about energy aware computing, the level at which this needs to be presented is significantly different from where we would sell a new piece of hardware.

Claudia Funke,  global ICT services practice leader at McKinsey & Company, challenged our industry (SAP and IBM) to adopt a more consultative sales approach and collaborate with strategy consultants (like those at McKinsey – I suppose ) to develop specific IoT solutions with our clients.

As every year, the IRF was a most interesting event – also the side program, which included a visit to Schloss Wackerbarth the Saxonian winery and to Volkswagen’s Gläserne Manufaktur where they produce their version of a luxury car, the Phaeton.

My name is Dr. Matthias Kaiserswerth and I’m the director of the IBM Zurich Research Lab.  Established in 1956 the Zurich Lab is one of IBM’s eight global research centers and is probably most famous for producing 4 Nobel Laureates in 1986 and 1987.

Why blog? Well, I speak at many conferences and I am a firm believer in open collaboration and innovation, particularly between academia, government and corporations.  And while I speak at conferences (view my presentations) and visit many universities, public officials and clients, I want to do more.  So I hope to use this blog to share my thoughts and observations about innovation, science and whatever else comes to mind as we collectively prepare for the future.