Interview with Dutch Nanotech Industry-Academia Leader in the advanced technology page of Nikkei Businees Daily.

Netherlands' governmental nanotechnology research project, NanoNed (industry-academia-government consortium) chairman Prof.dr.ir. David Reinhoudt (photo) recently visited Japan and was interviewed by the Japanese newspaper Nikkei.

- What kind of project is NanoNed?
It started in 2004 and will finish this year. Research has been promoted mainly with excellent 400 or more graduate students, whoare paid researchers, with a theme of 5-10 years commercialization target. Entrepreneural spirit seems be developed among the involved students who were just researchers before.

- Which organization do you research and what to research?
7 universities and governmental research institute TNO, Philips Electronics have participated. They are assigned project based on each expertise. It has been proceeded with 11 themes of research fields such as Spintronics and Photonics. Each of them has succeeded with good output and also each organization facility has been opened to researchers who work in and out of the Netherlands. These resulted in a basis to incubate new industry based on nanotechnology for the Netherlands.

- What do you do for the next?
Governmental support is still needed to commercialize the achievements to date. We are offering our government a new NanoNed to take it over until 2018. The required budget is 100 million Euro (about 13.2 billion yen) for 10 years. We will promote participation from Dutch companies on this project.

- What do you expect for Japan?
The Netherlands is good at basic research in nanotechnology. And in order to commercialize it in the industry, it is needed to strengthen relations with Japanese companies which are good at application research. For the past years we have exchanged information with Japanese companies such as NTT Basic Research Laboratories and NEC etc. In order for our researchers to easily have relations with Japan, we have established the NanoNed Japan Office in Twente University.

 
Prof.dr.ir. David Reinhoudt