Final Report Summary - NANORUCER (Mapping the NANOtechnology innovation system of RUssia for preparing future Cooperations between the EU and Russia)
Executive Summary:
Nanotechnology is expected to influence almost all industries in the 21st century. The European Commission has taken various initiatives to support the development of this field. Cooperation with 3rd countries is an important part of the European strategy. The 2009 work programme of NMP included a coordinated call with Russia. One of the top-ics was a support action on the "Mapping of nanotechnology and nano-structured ma-terials research infrastructures in Russia". The NANORUCER project was selected from this call.
To obtain an overview of the current status of nanotechnology-related research activi-ties in Russia compared to the EU and to other parts of the world, a performance analysis was carried out. Scientific activities were measured using bibliometric indica-tors. Technological and developmental output was traced by patent indicators. This analysis reveals that Russia is an important player in the worldwide scientific nanotechnology community with a clear specialisation in nanooptics and nanophysics. Also most of the larger European countries have a focus on these areas. Accordingly, within these fields opportunities for cooperation are likely.
A core part of NANORUCER was the fine mapping of the Russian SIS in nanotechnol-ogy. Key agents were identified and characterised. Results for R&D organisations and enterprises are documented in two searchable databases which are available publically on the NANORUCER website.
The analysis of the Russian SIS in nanotechnology reveals the following main strong points: a high level of education, in particular in mathematics, physics, chemistry and material sciences; a broad science base in nanotechnology-related research based on physical sciences; more than 700 R&D organisations with relevant activities in nanotechnology; scientific infrastructures for nanotechnology; a growing political sup-port for nanotechnology. A main weakness is a strong imbalance between R&D activi-ties and innovations-related activities. The private sector provides only low contribution to knowledge generation and innovation and science-industry interaction is weak. Par-ticular strengths of the European SIS in nanotechnology include public funding; avail-ability of research structures; the research base in nanooptics, nanophysics, nanobio-technology and nanomedicine; well-developed institutional frameworks with respect to EHS issues, and in particular strong industrial sectors which are relevant for the appli-cation of nanotechnology. Main weak points include a low level of private investment, in particular venture capital, and a fragmentation of R&D and innovation activities and support. One of the key problems of the future will be a lack of highly qualified person-nel.
For future cooperation between Russia and the EU in nanotechnology mutual benefit could be generated best if Russian competencies and capacities in basic and theoretical research are combined with the innovation perspective and experience of European R&D actors. In particular, we propose nanomaterials with a focus on metals and ce-ramics, and sensors and instruments as fields opening opportunities for short-term co-operation. Nanomagnets and nanocarbon-based applications offer mid-term opportuni-ties. Superconductivity and quantum-computing provide a number of interesting topics for mid- to long-term cooperation. In addition, we suggest to joint forces for further de-veloping institutional frameworks for nanotechnology within the global context, includ-ing, for example, standards, the EHS framework and regulation.
Project Context and Objectives:
Nanotechnology and the nanosciences are often referred to as "key" or "enabling" since they can pervade almost all technological sectors and accordingly are expected to influence almost all industries in the twenty-first century. These sectors include medical applications, information technology, energy production and storage, manu-facturing, instrumentation, and environmental applica¬tions. Accordingly, nanotechnol-ogy is seen as one of the most important fields of innovation and technology today. Applications in nanotechnology typically build upon the special features and functions of nanomaterials and nanostructures, in particular due to the enhanced surface to volume ratio. Thus, nanotechnology does not constitute a product per se but is typically present and integrated in a large variety of different applications in a large number of in¬dustrial sectors. It there¬fore can be understood as an enabler of innovative technolo¬gies and applications by substituting and improving existing products or leading to funda¬mentally new products.
In order to support the exploitation of the expected potential of nanotechnology and the nanosciences, large amounts have been invested in development. Worldwide, the re-spective private and public investment was around €9 billion in 2005. The most impor-tant investors are Europe (€2.5 billion), Japan (€2.7 billion), and the United States (€3.5 billion). Considering funding and investment, the world market being influenced by nanotechnology has been estimated to be in the range between €100 and €1,000 billion between 2005 and 2015. One market estimate for 2015 even approaches US$ 3,000 billion for manufactured goods incorporating nanotechnology, which would be a significant percentage of the world gross national product (GDP in 2007 was about US$50,000 billion).
For a number of years the European Commission has adopted various initiatives to support the development of nanotechnology and the nanosciences. In 2004 the Euro-pean Commission released a communication presenting its strategy for nanotechnol-ogy, followed by the resulting Action Plan 2005-2009, then the first implementa¬tion report in 2007, and a second implementation report in October 2009.
The im¬portance of nanotechnology and cooperation with countries outside the Euro-pean Union (Third Countries, which are neither Member nor Associated States), includ-ing Russia, is pointed out in these early EU strategy documents as an important part of the European strategy. Accordingly, the 2009 work programme of NMP (the Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and New Production Technologies theme, the EU's main instrument for funding research) included a coordinated call with Russia for grant proposals on nanotechnology-based sensors with a total EU funding of €4.65 million and comparable funding from the Russian Federation. The call requested pro-posals in three separate areas of research: optical-chemical sensing with nanoparticles, nano-waveguides and photonic structures; wireless surface acoustic wave physical sensors for operation in a wide temperature range; sensing of toxic and explosive agents in air based on metal-oxide semiconductor nano-structured materials.
A further topic was specified in another coordination call - a support action on the "mapping of nanotechnology and nano-structured materials research infrastructures in Russia." The NANORUCER project was selected from this call.
NANORUCER carried out an analysis of strengths and weaknesses of the Russian nanotechnology innovations system and a mapping of research activities in Russia on nanotechnology and nano-structured materials. A systematic comparison with corre-sponding EU activities will allow to identify opportunities for future EU-Russia coopera-tion.
The overall aim of the NANORUCER support activity was to pave the way for future cooperation between the EU and the Russian Federation in the field of nanotechnology and nano-structured materials (NN) as formulated in the description of the NMP work programme topic addressed.
The following three objectives were set to deliver to this overall aim through corre-sponding work packages as described below:
Objective 1: Mapping of nanotechnology and nano-structured materials activities in Russia
In order to achieve this objective we have designed work packages 1, 2 an 3. During WP 1 the methodological and analytical framework for the mapping exercise was de-veloped. Within WP 2 an overview performance analysis of NN activities in Russia and other countries was conducted, and WP 3 was concerned with the field work in Russia for fine mapping its NN activities.
Objective 2: Assessing the capacities of Russian NN R&D activities in order to identify strengths and weaknesses
WP 4 was concerned with the assessment of the Russian NN R&D capacities and de-livered to this objective.
Objective 3: Identifying opportunities for cooperation and developing recommendations and a specific action plan
For achieving this objective it is necessary to compare Russian NN activities with re-spective activities in European countries and to use this comparison for identifying those opportunities for cooperation where both partners would benefit most. Accordingly during WP 5 European NN activities were summarized based on already available information using the same analytical framework as in WP 4. Following, WP 6 was concerned with the elaboration of opportunities for cooperation and the development of recommendations and a concrete action plan.
Project Results:
Approach
The methodological approach is based on the concept of Sectoral Innovation Systems (SIS), developed by Franco Malerba . Malerba defines a SIS as a "set of new and es-tablished products for specific uses and the set of agents carrying out mar¬ket and non-market interactions for the creation, production and sale of those products. A SIS has a knowledge base, technologies, inputs and an (existing and poten¬tial) demand. The agents composing the sectoral system are organisations and individuals (e.g. consum-ers, entrepreneurs, scientists). Organisations may be firms (e.g. users, pro¬ducers and input suppliers) and non-firm organisations (e.g. universities, financial institu¬tions, gov-ernment agencies, trade-unions, or technical associations), including sub-units of larger organisations (e.g. R&D or production departments) and groups of organisations (e.g. industry associations). The SIS approach tries to explain the creation, transfer, and implementation of knowledge and innovations in a sector. It helps to understand the institutional boundaries of a sector, the key players and their interactions, and the knowledge base and innovation processes specific to a sector. The SIS model focuses on the systemic failures that are of specific importance to all actors. The SIS in nanotechnology is an emerging system. For emerging systems, it is most important to explain the emergence and evolution of the system, capacity building within the system, as well as the imbalances and frictions, which hamper knowledge production, transfer, and commercialization.
Based on this concept an analytical framework comprised of the following elements has been developed within NANORUCER: approaches and strategies for structuring the field, indicators for mapping the Russian NN system of innovation, sources to be used for the empirical work and tools for the empirical part of the study.
A first step for structuring the field was the elaboration of a suitable definition and de-lineation of nanotechnology. Until now there is still no unified and internationally ac-cepted clear definition of nanotechnology. In order to be consistent with the perform-ance analysis carried out within NANORUCER, we applied the definition of the Euro-pean Patent Office (EPO) (Scheu et al. 2006 ): "The term nanotechnology covers enti-ties with a controlled geometrical size of at least one functional component below 100 nm in one or more dimensions susceptible to make physical, chemical or biological effects available which are intrinsic to that size. It covers equipment and methods for controlled analyses, manipulation, processing, fabrication or measurement with a pre-cision below 100 nm."
As a tool for gathering and presenting in a systematic way activities of research organi-sations or firms in the nanotechnology and nano-structured materials research (NN) area, a competence matrix was developed which characterises the NN field along two dimensions: applications and markets for results of NN R&D activities and sub-technologies and -functions of NN.
For the analysis of publications and patent applications in nanotechnology during the performance analysis of NANORUCER search strategies for the respective data have been developed. In the case of patent analyses, relevant documents were identified in the databases of the EPO by retrieving patent applications which had been assigned a specific tag, labelling all those patents which are relevant for nanotechnology. The EPO assigns this Y01N tag to all respective patent applications and updates it continuously. The nanotechnology patent family is subdivided into six fields: nanobiotechnology; nanotechnology for information processing; storage and transmission; nanotechnology for materials and surface science; nanotechnology for interacting; sensing or actuating; nanooptics and nanomagnetics. For elaborating a search strategy for publications in nanotechnology several published approaches were compared. Finally, a key word-based search using the prefix "nano" was used for the analysis.
The two core parts of the mapping of the NN SIS in Russia comprise the mapping of universities and research organisations and the mapping of companies active in NN. For characterising these actors two sets of indicators have been developed: a set of input indicators which provide information on the resources, the internal strengths and the framework conditions for doing nanotechnology R&D and production, and a set of output indicators which are used for capturing the performance dimension. Input indica-tors refer, for example, to available facilities, human resources in terms of number, qualification, level of expertise, type of position and age and funding, including differen-tiation between private and public sources and characterisation of the different types of sources. Output indicators refer to scientific performance as measured by publication counts or contributions to scientific conferences or membership in review panels. The networking within scientific communities is considered, for example, by measuring in-volvement in external projects. Technological performance is measured by patent ap-plications. Technology transfer activities are reflected, for example, by the number of spin-off companies. In the case of industry, additional output measures were used re-lated to commercial activities. These include economic data such as turnover, share of exports or market shares, but also product- and service-specific indicators related to R&D activities, production, marketing, distribution and services provided.
Specific tools have been developed for the NANORUCER field work. For mapping of NN activities of research organisations, universities and companies, questionnaires have been developed, one specific questionnaire for the research institutions and uni-versities and another one for companies. Both questionnaires are structured in the fol-lowing way:
* Section 1 with general information about the organisation
* Section 2 aiming at characterising the NN activities
* Section 3 concentrating on the resources such as human capital, financing or funding and facilities
* Section 4 concerned with information about the various activities of the organi-sations in the NN field
* Section 5 asking for current bottlenecks and possible solutions for the further development and application of NN in Russia
In order to obtain a complete picture of the nanotechnology SIS in Russia, NANORUCER did not only focus on research organisations and companies active in nanotechnology. Rather, other important domains of the SIS are included in the map-ping. In particular this refers to private funding activities in terms of venture capital, in-novation infrastructure and policy-making and implementation. For gathering informa-tion from venture capital firms, incubators and funding agencies, information guidelines were developed which focus on a limited number of key elements in order to improve participation and response in the mapping activities.
The Europe SIS in NN was assessed using existing data. A set of input and output variables was used for that purpose. The analysis focuses on a comparison of the EU with Asia and the USA (and partly Russia) with respect to funding (public and private), research infrastructures and clusters, and cooperation with Third Countries as input indicators and publications (scientific publications and technology patents), market data, and commercialisation activities (e.g. in terms of products, companies and human resources) as output indicators. These few but important indicators allow for a rough but representative overview of the current EU position in the global context. The as-sessment was validated during an expert-workshop on March 25th 2011 in Brussels.
The identification of topics suggested for future cooperation between European and Russian groups in NN is based on various strands of NANORUCER research. We started with a performance analysis of R&D activities in NN in European countries and Russia, using bibliometric and patent indicators. This analysis allowed to identify spe-cialisation patterns of Russia compared to other regions of the world. A second core activity within NANORUCER was the mapping of the Russian nanotechnology SIS. Key actors of the nanotechnology innovation system could be identified and in particular their competences and interest in future cooperation could be elaborated. All in all 84 R&D organisations and 50 companies suggested topics for future cooperation. Thirdly, the European situation in NN was analysed based on already available information from other projects and studies. Thereby European competences could be assessed in a SWOT analysis. Fourthly, a very important contribution to the identification of future opportunities for cooperation was made by representatives of the Russian nanotech-nology research communities during two NANORUCER workshops in Moscow held in January 2011 and April 2011. A final strand of information was the assessment by European experts which was carried out during a workshop in Brussels in March 2011, followed by a series of personal interviews in order to assess cooperation opportunities.
In order to select core topics for future cooperation the following set of criteria was
applied:
* Competences and capacities: Cooperation would only be meaningful if both partners could contribute required competences in the fields under consideration and also the needed capacities in terms of human resources, equipment and infrastructures.
* Synergies: Competences and capacities of cooperation partners should be com-bined in a way which allows taking advantage of synergies.
* Mutual benefit: The benefit from cooperation should not be one-sided but rather be generated for both parts of the cooperation in a comparable way.
* Competitive advantage: Via cooperation a position of competitive advantage should be achieved by the cooperation parties which for example should also consider the potential to secure knowledge by IPR.
* High impact: Cooperation topics should have the potential to contribute to handling grand challenges, thereby generating future economic, social or environmental im-pact.
* Different time perspectives: Topics should be differentiated along the timeline and include short-term (2-4 years), medium-term (4-6 years) and long-term (7-10 years) activities.
For describing the opportunities for cooperation a strategic framework was developed. Accordingly topics were mapped along three main dimensions:
* Innovation areas related to grand challenges
* The enabling dimension including components, process-means, methods, nano-structures and nanomaterials, tools, models and equipment
* Scientific disciplines.
Overview: performance in NN
The performance analysis consists of two main parts. The first part is concerned with the analysis of scientific publications covering an overall analysis of NN but also the analysis of NN subfields. The second part comprises a patent analysis in NN. For that purpose patent applications at the European Patent Office were analysed.
Publication analysis
In order to obtain a first overview of worldwide publication activities in nanotechnology, we retrieved all publications during the period 2000-2009 from the SCI and analysed the contributions of different world regions to the total publication counts. Accordingly, the Asian region as defined by the most active countries Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, India and Singapore was publishing most nanotechnology papers, achieving a share of 41 per cent of the total of 432,004 publications identified by the search strategy used. Europe, defined as EU15 , contributed about 30 per cent and the United States 25 per cent of total publications. Russia obtained a considerable share of 4 per cent of all worldwide publications.
Scientific activities in nanotechnology as measured by publication output developed very dynamically over the ten-years-period considered. On a world level the number of publications increased by a factor of 3.5 between 2000 and 2009. The worldwide growth of nanotechnology publications is in particular remarkable if we compare it to the development of all worldwide publications which increased only by a factor of 1.3 over the ten-years-period considered. The most dynamic region was Asia where we observe an increase by a factor of almost 5.5 during this period. The Asian growth is mainly driven by China, Korea, India and Taiwan, while we observe a less dynamic development in Japan. But also in the USA, Europe (EU15) and Russia publication activities grew considerably during the last ten years. While the USA could almost triple its publication output, in the case of Russia we observe a doubling of the number of publications.
An important goal of the performance analysis was to identify focal points of research activities in different nanotechnology subareas in Russia compared to European and world regions. For that purpose we divide the total field of nanotechnology into the fol-lowing subfields: nanochemistry, nanophysics, nanomaterials, nanoengineering, multid-isciplinary nanoactivities, nanobio, nanomedicine, nanooptics and nanomodelling. As indicated by publication activities these fields vary considerably in size. We observe three large fields - nanomaterials, nanophysics and nanochemistry making together more than 70 per cent of all nanotechnology publications. On the other hand, nano-modelling and nanooptics belong to the smaller fields contributing 0.4 and 1.1 per cent, respectively to all publications. The other fields range between 4.1 and 8.6 per cent.
Specialisation of different regions within the described nanotechnology subfields were analysed by calculating the share of publications in nano subfields in all publications of the respective regions. Accordingly, Russia seems to be different from the other world regions in terms of focal activities mainly in two ways. Firstly, looking at the smaller fields there is a much stronger focus on nanooptics in Russia, while nanomedicine seems to be less important. Concerning the larger fields, Russia has the strongest focus on nanophysics compared to the other regions of the world.
In summary, this analysis could provide some first hints for potential fields of future cooperations. In the case of fields where Russia is an important player in the European context in terms of publication output (nanophysics, nanooptics, nanomodelling), we would expect a rather high number of potential subfields and research groups from Russia being interested in offering cooperation opportunities. On the other hand, in the smaller fields which are mainly concerned with the intersection of nanotechnology and life sciences, identifying potential themes and partners in Russia for cooperation might be more difficult.
Patent analyses
In order to obtain an overview of the contribution of different world regions to world-wide patenting activities in nanotechnology, we analysed the contribution of different regions to world-wide patent applications at the European Patent Office including EP and PCT applications over a 10-years period (1997-2006).
The United States turned out to be the most active contributor to patenting activities achieving a share of about one third of all patent applications. Europe defined as EU15 contributed almost 28 per cent of all patent applications, a similar share as the Asian countries with roughly 26 per cent. Russia obtained a share of 0.7 per cent of all patent applications. If we compare this share of Russia with the corresponding share of Russia in publication activities (4 per cent, figure 1), the propensity to patenting in Russia seems to be much lower compared to publication propensities. About 12 per cent of all patent applications were contributed by the rest of the world (RoW).
When analysing the dynamics of patent applications in nanotechnology in different world regions we observe a rather strong growth of patenting activities on a world level between 1997 and 2005 where patent applications grew by a factor of roughly 3.5. To-wards 2006 patenting activities seem to drop again. Due to the high share of the USA in all patent applications, the worldwide dynamics is strongly influenced by the behaviour of the United States. For this region we observe a very strong growth of patenting activities by a factor of 8 between 1997 and 2004 followed by a considerable drop to-wards the year 2006. The dynamics of patenting activities in Europe and Asian coun-tries is similar to the worldwide activities. In the case of Russia we observe a rather stable development with no remarkable growth.
The worldwide decline of nanotechnology patent applications between 2004 and 2006 which is driven largely by the patenting behaviour of the United States seems to be a specific phenomenon for nanotechnology since patenting activities over all technologies continued to increase during this period at the world level and also at the level of the United States.
In order to analyse patenting activities of Russia and other world regions in different subfields of nanotechnology, we differentiate nanotechnology into six subareas: nano-materials, nanoelectronics, nanooptics, nanobiotech, nanomechanics, nanomagnetics. These fields have been defined by the EPO and cover different categories of the inter-national patent classification (IPC). Accordingly they can be used for analysing subfield-specific patenting behaviour. Nanomaterials comprises the largest of these subareas corresponding to 35 per cent of the 17.359 total nanotechnology patent applications worldwide over the period 1997 to 2006. Nanoelectronics with 26 per cent is another larger area. Nanooptics and nanobiotech each contribute 12 per cent, nanomechanics 9 per cent and nanomagnetics 6 per cent of the worldwide total nanotechnology patent applications.
For a detailed analysis of the relative specialisation of Russia in different nanotechnol-ogy fields, we calculated the patent specialisation indicator RTA. Basically, this indicator relates the share of patent applications of a specific country in a specific field to the share of all patent applications of this country in all patent applications world-wide. Thereby, this indicator provides information on relative specialisation of different coun-tries, compensating for size effects and different propensities to patenting. This analysis indicates that Russia presents a clear specialisation in nanooptics and nanomechanics. None of the other three major regions considered is characterised by a similar specialisation pattern. Nanobiotechnology, on the other hand, is the subfield where Russia is not specialised in. Interestingly, the Asian countries express a similar under-specialisation in nanobiotechnology.
In summary, the performance analysis indicates that Russia is an important player in the world-wide scientific nanotechnology community. With respect to scientific activi-ties, we observe a clear specialisation of Russia in two subfields of nanotechnology, namely nanooptics and nanophysics. On the other hand, the intersection between nanotechnology and life sciences as defined by the scientific fields nanomedicine and nanobiotechnology is a field were we observe lower intensities of scientific activities in Russia. Thus, the analysis of scientific performance using bibliometric indicators gives some first ideas about potential nanotechnology subfields for future cooperation be-tween Russia and European countries. The fields of nanooptics and nanophysics, where we observe a clear specialisation of Russia are also areas where most European countries present rather intensive activities. Accordingly, we would expect a number of interesting opportunities for cooperation within these larger subfields. On the other hand, life sciences-related nanotechnology research could be an area where European countries and Russia could contribute complementary competencies for joint activities, combining rather intensive strong European research activities with currently lower and more focussed Russian activities.
The Russian SIS in NN
The mapping of the Russian SIS in NN comprises the following elements:
Gathering information about the main actors of the Russian NN innovation system; setting up the database structure for the different types of actors; analysis and mapping of information collected by scientific NN subfields and regions of the Russian Federa-tion; developing of databases for R&D organisations, research infrastructure centres, business incubators, venture funds and nano companies; elaboration of maps of the distribution of the different actor types across the regions of the Russian Federation.
With respect to research organisations two databases were set up. The first database of R&D organisations in NN is structured into the following sub-directories:
D1: name of organisation
D2: contact information
D3: contact person
D4: location
D5: fields of NN
D6: type of organisation (academic research institute, university, organisation of minis-tries and agencies, organisation of branch science transformed during the privatisation, private research organisation)
D7: year of foundation
D8: human capacities (staff number, number of R&D personnel, differentiation of R&D personnel into post-doctoral degree holders and PhD holders)
D9: facilities available at the organisation (open field)
This database provides a comprehend overview of research organisations of the Rus-sian Federation which carry out R&D in NN. Over 700 organisations are included from large well-known research institutes to small emerging units. Organisations are spread over all regions ("okrugs") of the Russian Federation. Analysing the type of organisa-tions indicates that 28 per cent belong to the academic sector, represented by the or-ganisations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, the Russian Academy of Architecture and Building, the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and by the research institute of all regional branches of the Rus-sian Academy of Sciences. The university sector comprises the largest share of all R&D organisations containing information on over 280 organisations, corresponding to 41 per cent of the total. The third largest sector comprises organisations of ministries and agencies including state research centres which got this status in the middle of the 19th of the last century and are oriented mainly on applied studies and public research organisations which perform under the umbrella of federal ministries and agencies or under the umbrella of regional authorities. In this group we have available information of about 100 organisations.
Looking at the regional distribution of the organisations we observe a strong concentra-tion in the central federal "okrug" which is Moscow and the region around Moscow, where about 50 per cent of all organisations are located. This concentration of NN ac-tivities around Moscow is in line with the general trends of regional distribution of Rus-sian science and has its historical roots.
As a second database, a target database, of R&D organisations was elaborated based on information collected via a survey of R&D organisations in Russia. For the survey the 700 organisations identified for the first database were asked to provide more de-tailed information about their activities in NN. In addition to the basic structural and or-ganisational information about the research organisations, the survey revealed struc-tured information about activities in different nanotechnology fields, in different applica-tion areas of nanotechnology and also asked for assessments of framework conditions for doing nanotechnology research in Russia. In addition, organisations were asked to propose topics for future joint research activities between Russian and European re-search groups. Finally, detailed information about available facilities in the institutes and also lists of references were provided. Over 80 organisations of all types located in all federal "okrugs" participated in the survey. It turned out that the academic sector was more active in answering the questionnaires compared to universities. Therefore, about 40 per cent of the sample is represented by the academic sector, about 28 per cent by universities. Concerning the regional distribution we find the same concentration of organisations on the Moscow regions as already observed for the database of research organisations.
Most of the organisations are active in the area of nanomaterials which corresponds with the observations made during the performance analysis, indicating that nanomate-rials and nanophysics belong to the strong points of Russian nanotechnology R&D ac-tivities. Interestingly, a rather large share of the institutes indicates to be active in the area of nanobiotechnology. However, a more detailed analysis of these data indicates that in many cases this orientation reflects more the expected future position of the institutes than the current activities. This may be an indication of the high expectations which are set into this area by a large share of the Russian nanotechnology R&D or-ganisations.
In summary, the mapping of research organisations in nanotechnology in Russia pro-vided a broad and detailed information basis for the identification of interesting topics and themes for future cooperation. The database is available on the NANORUCER website: www.nanorucer.eu.
In a comparable way to R&D organisations also for industrial enterprises two data-bases were set up. The first database of nano companies relies mainly on secondary information published by different actors of the Russian and the international nanotechnology arena. Most important sources for setting up the databases were the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, RUSNANO, the National Nanotech Network, regional authorities and regional nanotech networks, information from the European Union, Internet sources, conference proceedings and information published in scientific journals. As an additional important source of information we could use the survey of R&D organisations. R&D organisations were also asked whether they had set up start-up companies in the nanotech area. Thereby we could identify 28 spin-offs from different research institutes and universities. The database was arranged into the following directories: D1 company name, D2 location and con-tact, D3 contact person, D4 function of contact person. The companies were also mapped across the federal okrugs of the Russian Federation and the subjects.
All in all, the database of nano companies contained more than 410 companies entries, including large well-known cooperations as well as small emerging spin-offs. Concern-ing the regional distribution we observe a strong concentration in the Moscow region which is comparable to the concentration of R&D organisations. Roughly 50 per cent of the companies are located in this area. Behind Moscow the second important location is the St. Petersburg region were roughly 50 companies are located.
The second database, the target database of nano companies, was set up using addi-tional information provided by a survey of nano companies carried out within NANORUCER. The target database contains the following information:
D1: name of organisation,
D2: location,
D3: contact person,
D4: contact information,
D5: foundation year,
D6: year of start of nanotechnology activities,
D7: type of activities (R&D, production, service, marketing and distribution),
D8: founders of company,
D9: products
D10: main markets in terms of industrial sectors such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, aerospace, transport, ICT,
D11: human resources,
D12: technological fields.
All in all, the target database contains detailed information of about roughly 50 nano companies in Russia. About 60 per cent of the companies are spin-offs from academia, more than 90 per cent of the companies provide R&D services in NN. Many of the companies also suggested topics for collaborative projects with the European partners. The database is available on the NANORUCER website: www.nanorucer.eu.
In addition to the main databases (R&D organisations and companies) within NANORUCER also databases of other important actors of the Russian nanotechnology SIS were elaborated:
* a database with information about 128 research infrastructure centres,
* a database with 33 business incubators,
* a database with 102 technology transfer centres and
* a database with 14 venture funds.
Assessment of the European and the Russian SIS in NN
Europe
The global distribution of R&D investments, publications and patents indicate that nanotechnology related research and development activities are concentrated in a few countries and regions of the world. The United States dominates in this context, fol-lowed by Japan and some of the larger EU countries (Germany, France, UK). Nonethe-less, some smaller countries also show up as being very active when considering size differences across countries (OECD 2009 ).
With respect to nanotechnology funding, the EU is quite strong and comparable to other world regions, like USA and Asia. Available data on public funding and regional centres of nanotechnology activity suggest that the EU and its Member States are competitive overall, even though there were time lags in the provision of public funds in the early years of this decade (EURONANO 2009 ). In addition there are problems concerning implementation of public funding. These include, for example, fragmenta-tion and parallelisation. There are many examples where parallel activities are funded by public money producing redundant results at all levels (local, regional, federal, European). Another problem concerns a lack of a focussed strategy for funding along the complete innovation chain. Basically the instruments are available for doing so, the money is there, however, coordination is lacking and accessibility is difficult. A more focussed and strategic funding approach would require identifying the key bottlenecks along the innovation chain and direct suitable funding instruments to those. Europe does not provide private funding (in particular venture capital) to the same extent as other regions like the US or Japan, which may hint to a worse performance in terms of commercialisation of nanotechnology.
Research infrastructures are excellent and strongly supported in the EU, technology platforms and cluster activities are visible but could be coordinated and complement better with other activities and stakeholders for sake of defragmentation and improved synergies. Cooperation among the EU Member States as well as with Third Coun-tries has been established in the past but will be of more importance in areas of joint global thematic and strategic interest and will have to be further developed (e.g. for regulation, standardisation, risk assessment, etc.).
Science and technology indicators remain the most reliable source of information for assessing the competitive position of world regions and countries. The EU Member States perform well in terms of R&D, especially with respect to scientific activity measured by publications. In terms of technology development measured by patents, the EU performance is solid yet not as strong as on the science side. While EU Member States are often on par with the US, nano-electronics is an area of relative weakness. The US remains the main competitor across all relevant areas. However, the rapid entry of "newcomer" countries such as BRIC countries and the South-East Asian countries should also be highlighted. All of these countries are characterised by rapid growth rates in the number of publications and patents although from low starting levels. These results suggest that the thrust of nanotechnology R&D may partly be shifting away from traditional countries which have had a longer history of involvement in nanotechnology (EURONANO 2009 , OECD 2009 ).
Typical of an emerging field, the level of uncertainty is high and there is considerable variety in market estimates. While these factors are not restricted to nanotechnologies, they must be taken into consideration when interpreting data. The potential socio-economic impacts of nanotechnology are considered very large especially in terms of forecast market size for nanotechnology-related products, the multiplicity of applica-tions and their potential to contribute to addressing global challenges (OECD 2009 ). The USA is the strongest actor bringing nanotechnology products into the market, fol-lowed by Asia and the EU. With respect to firm/company creation also the USA are leading world wide, however, Europe as a further player with substantial activity on the level of individual Member States. However, reliable assessments of these socio-economic impacts still suffer from a lack of indicators and statistics, jointly agreed defi-nitions of nanotechnology and methodologies for its measurement. Available market forecasts, company and nanotechnology product inventories are only indicative while technology roadmaps are difficult to undertake due to the broadness of the field (OECD 2009 ). The EU has great strengths in different sectors such as transport, energy, chemistry, materials; manufacturing, and medicine, where nanotechnology plays an important role and scientific strengths of the EU can be identified.
Besides the discussed indicators for measuring R&D performance and competitive-ness, a number of key factors have to be mentioned, which are highly relevant for the future commercialisation and acceptance of nanotechnology:
Technology transfer between academia and industry is particularly important for nanotechnology. Due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of NN, this is more compli-cated compared to other technologies. The main challenge here is to balance undi-rected basic research aiming at pure scientific progress with a view on commercialisa-tion prospects and the specific needs of users and markets. Direct collaboration be-tween science and industry often helps in this respect, but raises the issue of how intel-lectual property is assigned to the individual partners (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). If Europe is to operate as a single market for knowledge, it is not enough simply to increase public investment in research. Rather, it is important to create a framework that facilitates knowledge transfer by removing the barriers hindering collaboration between research and industry (EC 2009a ).
With respect to the market demand, users typically do not adopt new technology solely based on their technical superiority but rather on a price-cost advantage over established technologies, taking into account issues such as safety, compatibility to other products and existing production processes, and acceptance by their own clients (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). Creating new markets, however, with nanotechnology will change the game, but breakthrough products are needed (blockbusters, not otherwise achiev-able). As for any newly emerging technology, potential impacts of nanotechnology on environment, health, safety (EHS) have been discussed widely, since there is a widespread concern of potential negative effects from nanotechnology (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). Investment in nanomaterials EHS risk research must be maintained or pref-erably increased to US levels to ensure that Europe remains competitive with respect to developments in global regulations (EAG 2009 ). There is evidence that the US is investing in research into the environment, health and safety risks of engineered nanomaterials at annual rate that is three times the European level (EAG 2009 ).
Within the EC's Public Online Consultation on Nanotechnology experts and the general public identified many benefits in nanotechnologies, as well as potential risks (EC 2010 ). More than 80 per cent have either high or reasonable expectations of nanotechnologies in general, but some areas are seen as more promising than others, with regard to their expected benefits and potential risks: ICT and energy are seen as the areas of application where the benefits far outweigh any potential risks. Applications in aerospace, construction, sustainable chemistry, security and environment are seen as areas that would bring high benefits. Applications in agriculture, food and household items are regarded with more scepticism, although potential benefits in these areas were also identified. Applications in healthcare are universally seen as very promising, but there is a strong perception of potential risks (EC 2010 ).
Commercialising nanotechnology products broadly will require acceptance (and trust) by users and all other parties that may be concerned by nanotechnology products. As-sessing and minimising perceived risk potentials are important activities. Certainty about regulatory issues is also critical for nanotechnology producers to decide about investment and directions of future research (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). In order to enhance commercialisation prospects of new nanotechnology applications, measurement and testing methods have to be developed and validated. Clearly, infrastructures have a key enabling role in supporting this research. Based on this, standards have to be implemented and an effective regulatory framework should be put in place that takes into account EHS concerns, while at the same time acknowledges the progress that nanotechnology innovations can have for the environment and health. An open dia-logue between governments, industry, research and the wider society should address EHS concerns and how these are dealt with (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). Demand is also high for requirements to ensure that adequate information is provided on consumer products (EC 2010 ).
On the other hand, there is a good or very good perception of EU governance related to nanotechnologies in terms of stakeholder consultation and setting research priorities (EC 2010 ). The Commission is also heavily involved in the current work within the OECD Working Party for Manufactured Nanomaterials (WPMN), which is developing test methods and guidelines for risk assessment and regulation. Moreover, the ISO standardisation work will facilitate a global convergence in standards for the implementation of regulation (EC 2009a ).
Russia
The analysis of the Russian SIS in NN is based mainly on the information elaborated during the mapping of the Russian NN SIS during NANORUCER. In particular the da-tabases and surveys described above formed valuable sources of information. In addi-tion, more than 200 interviews with managers of incubators, of venture funds or venture management companies were carried out. Statistical information from the State Statis-tical Committee of the Russian Federation, from the Ministry of Education and Science and from the Russian corporation RUSNANO could also be analysed for the assess-ment. This national information was complemented by available international sources provided, for example, by the OECD and by the European Commission. The analysis reveals the following main findings:
Currently the Russian SIS in NN is looking for new trajectories. It is marked by diver-sity and by a lack of coherence in different nanotechnology fields, with respect to dif-ferent actors and also to strategic decisions in its current early and developing stage. Particular strengths of the Russian educational and R&D system in physics, chemis-try and material sciences as well as a long standing tradition in nanoscale research, provide a good background for the future development of the NN-related SIS. Cur-rently, the Russian SIS in NN can be characterised as a growing system with rapid institutional changes, emerging systems of governance and a geopolitical orientation mostly towards the European Union.
Key players in the Russian NN SIS are the Federal Ministry for Education and Sci-ence, the RUSNANO corporation and the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the re-search area only a few universities are playing an important role. The RUSNANO cor-poration is a rather new player but has been developing very rapidly into a strong or-ganisation with global orientation.
Still, the Russian SIS in NN remains fragmented and misbalanced. We observe a rather strong R&D system which on the other hand is opposed to an underdeveloped financial and innovation system, less developed infrastructures, and accordingly a less developed nano market. In order to deal with these imbalances at the federal and re-gional level, new institutions have emerged for the coordination of different political bodies and for facilitating a dialogue between different stakeholders. However, strong departmental interests and path dependencies hamper the transition to a new model of policy development and implementation in NN.
Activities of public bodies are mainly oriented towards the development of research infrastructure, towards closing institutional gaps in the SIS and towards further develop-ing human capacity. In this respect, such activities can be considered as comparable to other European countries. In particular public investment in NN development increased substantially after the presidential nanotechnology initiative was launched in 2007.
A main problem of the Russian SIS in NN is the private sector, in a sense that it does not provide significant contributions to knowledge generation. A non-competitive and monopolised home market, a non-effective system of technical regulations as well as a lack of in-house R&D capacity undermine the private sectors' motivation.
The institutional set up of the SIS in NN is well developed, however, most R&D ca-pacities are concentrated in the academic sector. Remarkably, academia provides R&D in all NN fields. However, strong imbalances could be observed. Namely there is rather large R&D capacity concentrated in the area of nanomaterials, while life-sciences-related fields are less dynamic. In basic research Russian nanoscience is still considered to be among the world's leading players, although new actors are emerging and competing increasingly with the Russian situation. These include in particular Asian countries, such as China, South Korea or Singapore.
The home market related to NN is dominated by foreign companies. The majority of Russian companies are small and medium-sized enterprises and spin-offs of academia. Administrative barriers, high-credit interest and lack of qualified personnel hamper business development in these small nano companies. Emerging companies already export nano-enabled products and have strong ambitions to expand their world market niche. However, a lack of experience and lack of public support impede such activities. These problems in commercial development of nanotechnology in Russia not least are influenced by cultural issues, since in general Russian R&D organisations do not have a tradition of commercialising research results. Among others a weak emphasis on generating IPR and strong patent portfolios among academia support this notion.
Opportunities for cooperation
Following the approach described in the first section a total of seventeen core topics was identified which have been classified into seven fields (table 1). Each topic is de-scribed with a short one or two-page profile summarising the main features of the topic according to the described dimensions (for details see deliverable 6.4). Finally a road-map is developed positioning the topics along the timescale and indicating short-term, medium-term or long-term opportunities for cooperation.
Table 1: Overview of core topics
Nanometals
1 Plasma technology for production of metallic nanoparti-cles/-structures
2 Metallic nanoporous filters/membranes
3 Nanometals for extreme conditions
4 Superhard/-tough composites with superconducting properties
5 Vacuum-tight X-ray transparent Beryllium components
Nanoceramics
6 Process technology for nanoceramics
7 Electroceramics
8 Coatings for high-temperature shielding
9 Shielding materials for electromagnetic radiation
Carbon-based materials
10 Nanocarbon-based sensors (e.g. CNT, graphene)
Nanomagnets
11 Nanomagnets and their optimized production
12 Electronics/electronic devices based on spintronics
Sensors and Instruments
13 Plasmonic sensors and devices
14 Advanced UHV-setup for analysing and modelling surface reactions for nanoelectronic devices
Superconductivity
15 Theory for nanoscale enhanced high-temperature superconductivity
16 Nano-analysis and applications for superconducting de-vices
Quantum computing
17 Theoretical models for quantum computing
Conclusions
The performance analysis carried out within NANORUCER indicates that scientific activities in nanotechnology as measured by publication output increased very rapidly worldwide during the last ten years. We observe an average growth rate of nanotech-nology publications of 3.5 compared to an average growth rate of 1.3 over all scientific disciplines. The dynamics of nanotechnology publications is mainly driven by Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, China, India and Singapore) and the United States, while in terms of overall publishing activities EU15 is the second most active region with a share of 30 per cent of all publications compared to 41 per cent for Asia and 25 per cent for the USA. Russia is an important player in the world-wide scientific nanotechnology community. With respect to scientific activities, we observe a clear specialisation of Russia in two subfields of nanotechnology, namely nanooptics and nanophysics. On the other hand, the intersection between nanotechnology and life sci-ences is a field were we observe lower intensities of scientific activities in Russia. Thus, the analysis of scientific performance using bibliometric indicators gives some first ideas about potential nanotechnology subfields for future cooperation between Russia and European countries. The fields of nanooptics and nanophysics, where we observe a clear specialisation of Russia are also areas where most European countries present rather intensive activities. Accordingly, we would expect a number of interesting oppor-tunities for cooperation within these larger subfields.
The patent analyses reveal only low numbers of international patents from Russia. We propose two different explanations for this situation. Firstly, if we assume that publica-tions reflect scientific activities and patent applications indicate activities concerned with applied research, technology transfer and commercialisation, we would conclude that nanotechnology activities in Russia currently are mainly focussed on basic research. Secondly, we could also assume that the low number of patents does not reflect adequately the application- and commercialisation activities in Russia. Rather, it mainly would indicate a low prospensity to protecting inventions with international patents. This could be due to lacking awareness of the role of patents, to language biases, to constraints in financing patent applications or to other reasons. In both cases we would argue for future policy support activities, however, different strategies would be needed in each case. In the first case (low intensity of applied research and commercialisation activities), the task would be to support building up applied research and commercialisation activities. In the second case (low prospensity to patenting), support-ing activities should focus more on providing information, racing the awareness of the role and significance of patent protection, providing advice in legal issues related to patenting, and finally supporting patenting activities financially.
The analysis of the Russian SIS in NN reveals the following strong points: the level of education in particular in the disciplines mathematics, physics, chemistry and material sciences is high in the international context. We also observe a broad science base in nanotechnology-related research based on physical sciences. These include nanoop-tics, nanomaterials and nanophysics. The institutional set up of R&D organisations is well developed. There are more than 700 organisations with activities in nanotechnol-ogy. Most of these belong to the Russian Academy of Sciences. Also infrastructures for nanotechnology-related research are well in place. Not least since the recent initiative on nanotechnology of the Russian presidency there is a growing policy support for nanotechnology in terms of funding and in terms of new initiatives for innovation. An-other important driving force of nanotechnology in Russia is the corporation RUSNANO which has been established during the last years as a global player aiming at supporting the commercialisation of nanotechnology. Finally, the geopolitical orientation of Russia is mostly towards the European Union which forms another positive condition for future cooperation in NN.
On the other hand, we also observe a number of weak points of the Russian SIS in NN. These include fragmentation and misbalances between the different constituents of the innovation system. In particular, there is a strong imbalance between activities related to R&D and activities related to innovation, the latter still being rather weak. Concerning different areas of nanotechnology, nanotechnology research related to life sciences has only been emerging recently. Science-industry interaction is rather weak. The private sector provides only low contribution to knowledge generation. In particular, we observe only a low level of in-house R&D activities. Also with respect to innovation activities, the private sector presents a rather weak performance as measured, for example, in the number of patent applications or the number of innovative products. Systems for technical regulations and also the financial infrastructure are developed rather weakly in Russia.
Strong points of the European SIS in NN include public funding, not least by the Euro-pean Union and the available research infrastructures. Also the research base in par-ticular in nanooptics-, nanophysics-, biotechnology- and biomedicine-related nanotech-nology can be considered as strong. The institutional framework is well developed. This includes legislation, activities related to environmental, health and safety (EHS) issues, risk assessment activities and joint activities towards standardisation. Since nanotech-nology at a first hand will be mainly used in industrial sectors, it is also important to note that those sectors were nanotechnology is expected to exert strongest influence are very well-developed in Europe. These include the automotive industry, energy, chemistry, materials and manufacturing. Compared to the USA and also to the main Asian competitors, a number of weak points of the European SIS in NN need to be mentioned. These include private investment, in particular venture capital, and a frag-mentation of R&D and innovation activities and support, commercial performance, and also an increasing lack of highly qualified human resources.
With respect to future cooperation between Russia and the EU in NN results of the NANORUCER project allow the following conclusions. A win-win situation can be gen-erated via cooperation if complementary science bases and research infrastructures are combined. This requires that common goals need to be identified. We suggest that these could be oriented best at the grand challenges (including health, environment, energy and communication) as identified by various international organisations. Mutual benefit could be generated best if Russian competences and capacities in basic and theoretical research activities are combined with the innovation perspective and ex-perience of European R&D actors. Complementary skills could be linked up and further developed also via exchange of personnel between the two regions. In addition, further developing institutional frameworks for nanotechnology in joint activities and in a global context could be a beneficial field of action in the NN context. This includes standards, the EHS framework and regulation.
Starting from these principle considerations we suggest nanomaterials, in particular metals and ceramics, sensors and instruments as fields opening opportunities for co-operation in a short term. Nanomagnets- and nanocarbon-based applications offer mid-term opportunities. Finally, superconductivity and quantum computing provide a number of topics for mid- to long-term cooperation.
As follow-up activities of the NANORUCER project a refinement and implementation of the suggested topics into future calls of the European Union would be necessary. In addition, we also strongly propose to monitor the further development of cooperations between the European Union and the Russian Federation in NN. This could in particular contribute to mutual learning from good or best practices.
Potential Impact:
The expected impact of the NANORUCER project as described in Annex 1 (description of work) includes the following:
* Improvement of knowledge of the Russian research capacities in nanotechnology and nano-structured materials (NN),
* Provision of reliable information to pave the way for future EU-Russia cooperation in NN,
* Contribution to increasing the cooperation between European and Russian research organisations in the area of NN.
The improvement of knowledge of Russian research capacity in nanotechnology was at the heart of the NANORUCER support activity. We considered as not being sufficient just to collect and map information in a systematic way. Rather an assess-ment of the obtained information along predefined criteria was seen as crucial. For that purpose within the NANORUCER activity a set of indicators and assessment tools was developed in the very beginning and used in the following work packages. The final assessment itself was a combination of desk research, including science and technol-ogy indicators and expert assessments.
The key results which are relevant for improving the knowledge of the Russian re-search capacities in NN are documented in two databases. The first database contains detailed information of more than 80 research organisations active in NN. The second database summarises information of more than 50 companies being active in nanotechnology in Russia and providing also research capacities. Both databases are available on the NANORUCER website (www.nanorucer.eu). Search functions allow detailed searches for specific topics and research activities. Feedback from the re-search communities and also from representatives of industry indicates that both data-bases are used intensively in Russia and also in European countries.
In addition to these main databases also databases of other important actors of the Russian nanotechnology SIS were elaborated. These include a database of research infrastructure centres (128 entries), a database of business incubators (33 entries), a database of technology transfer centres (102 entries), and a database of venture funds (14 entries).
All these databases have been described in detail in various reports which have been submitted as deliverables no. 15 and 16 and which are also available on the NANORUCER website.
Based on this information but also using external sources, a careful analysis of the Russian SIS in NN has been carried out. The results of this analysis are documented in an analytical paper - Russian nanotech innovation systems: the key trends, barriers and opportunities -, which has been submitted as deliverable no. 17 and which is also available on the NANORUCER website.
In order to provide reliable information to pave the way for future EU-Russia coop-eration, the work packages of NANORUCER have been designed in a way that al-lowed a continuous interplay between data gathering and data evaluation. In particular the same analytical framework developed in work package 1 turned out to be very use-ful for analysing the situation in Russia as well as in Europe. In addition, specific work-shops were carried out to validate the results of the project team by external experts.
The information about the Russian SIS in NN as elaborated during work packages 3 and 4 was complemented by information on the European situation in NN using mainly existing literature. In addition, performance indicators relying on publications and patent applications have been gathered allowing an objective assessment of the performance of various European and other countries compared to Russia in terms of scientific ac-tivities and also in terms of activities related to technology development and commercial orientation. The results of the assessment of the European situation have been summarised in deliverable 12 - Thesis paper on European strengths and weaknesses in NN R&D. The assessment has been discussed and validated during a workshop on March 25th, 2011 in Brussels with 14 experts from scientific communities, industry and policy-making representing the countries France, United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, Swit-zerland, Germany and Russia. Results of the validation workshop have been submitted as deliverable 13.
Finally, both the situation in Europe and the situation in Russia in terms of nanotech-nology-related research have been summarised in a SWOT analysis providing a com-prehensive assessment of both sectoral innovation systems.
The NANORUCER activity will contribute to increasing cooperation between EU and Russian organisations in several ways. Firstly, the information basis about the Russian SIS in NN allows research groups from Europe and other countries to obtain a better picture of the whole NN-related SIS in Russia and also to identify possible part-ners for cooperation. In particular the databases developed within NANORUCER are useful tools serving that purpose. Secondly, a main activity within NANORUCER was the identification of possible topics for future cooperation between research groups of Russia and the EU. Within work package 6 a total of 17 core topics for future coopera-tion were identified which have been classified into the 7 fields nanometals, nanoce-ramics, carbon-based materials, nanomagnets, sensors and instruments, superconduc-tivity, and quantum-computing. These topics were presented to the research and indus-trial communities during the final workshop of NANORUCER organised on October 25th, 2011 in Brussels. 31 representatives from research organisations, industrial en-terprises and policy-making from European countries and Russia intensively discussed and finally validated the proposed topics. The validated topics for future cooperation including a roadmap indicating the time perspective for the individual topics were sum-marised and submitted in deliverable no. 13.
Additional important dissemination activities include two project workshops organ-ised in Moscow on January 13th, 2011 and April 15th, 2011. These workshops provided an opportunity to present the results of NANORUCER to key representatives of the Russian SIS in NN. In addition, opportunities for future cooperation were discussed intensively during these workshops. The final NANORUCER workshop on October 25th, 2011 in Brussels provided another forum for disseminating NANORUCER results among the scientific and industrial communities.
In addition, the NANORUER activity was presented at the following meetings:
* Information workshop "Supporting participation of Russian organisations in FP7-NMP projects", June 18th, 2010, Moscow,
* Conference "Industrial technologies 2010", September 8th, 2010, Brussels.
As an additional dissemination activity the results of the performance analysis have been published as a scientific paper in Nanotechnology Law and Business: Reiss, T. and Thielmann, A. (2010): Nanotechnology research in Russia - an analysis of scientific publications and patent applications. In: Nanotechnology Law and Business 7 (4), pp. 387-404.
Finally, the NANORUCER website was used as an important dissemination channel of results of the NANORUCER activity: www.nanorucer.eu. In addition, the NANORUCER website is linked to the Nanofutures platform (www.nanofutures.eu). In order to disseminate results of NANORUCER among the Russian communities in addition to the NANORUCER website main results are also presented on the website of the Russian partner of NANORUCER, ISS RAS: http://issras.ru/eng/
List of Websites:
www.nanorucer.eu
Nanotechnology is expected to influence almost all industries in the 21st century. The European Commission has taken various initiatives to support the development of this field. Cooperation with 3rd countries is an important part of the European strategy. The 2009 work programme of NMP included a coordinated call with Russia. One of the top-ics was a support action on the "Mapping of nanotechnology and nano-structured ma-terials research infrastructures in Russia". The NANORUCER project was selected from this call.
To obtain an overview of the current status of nanotechnology-related research activi-ties in Russia compared to the EU and to other parts of the world, a performance analysis was carried out. Scientific activities were measured using bibliometric indica-tors. Technological and developmental output was traced by patent indicators. This analysis reveals that Russia is an important player in the worldwide scientific nanotechnology community with a clear specialisation in nanooptics and nanophysics. Also most of the larger European countries have a focus on these areas. Accordingly, within these fields opportunities for cooperation are likely.
A core part of NANORUCER was the fine mapping of the Russian SIS in nanotechnol-ogy. Key agents were identified and characterised. Results for R&D organisations and enterprises are documented in two searchable databases which are available publically on the NANORUCER website.
The analysis of the Russian SIS in nanotechnology reveals the following main strong points: a high level of education, in particular in mathematics, physics, chemistry and material sciences; a broad science base in nanotechnology-related research based on physical sciences; more than 700 R&D organisations with relevant activities in nanotechnology; scientific infrastructures for nanotechnology; a growing political sup-port for nanotechnology. A main weakness is a strong imbalance between R&D activi-ties and innovations-related activities. The private sector provides only low contribution to knowledge generation and innovation and science-industry interaction is weak. Par-ticular strengths of the European SIS in nanotechnology include public funding; avail-ability of research structures; the research base in nanooptics, nanophysics, nanobio-technology and nanomedicine; well-developed institutional frameworks with respect to EHS issues, and in particular strong industrial sectors which are relevant for the appli-cation of nanotechnology. Main weak points include a low level of private investment, in particular venture capital, and a fragmentation of R&D and innovation activities and support. One of the key problems of the future will be a lack of highly qualified person-nel.
For future cooperation between Russia and the EU in nanotechnology mutual benefit could be generated best if Russian competencies and capacities in basic and theoretical research are combined with the innovation perspective and experience of European R&D actors. In particular, we propose nanomaterials with a focus on metals and ce-ramics, and sensors and instruments as fields opening opportunities for short-term co-operation. Nanomagnets and nanocarbon-based applications offer mid-term opportuni-ties. Superconductivity and quantum-computing provide a number of interesting topics for mid- to long-term cooperation. In addition, we suggest to joint forces for further de-veloping institutional frameworks for nanotechnology within the global context, includ-ing, for example, standards, the EHS framework and regulation.
Project Context and Objectives:
Nanotechnology and the nanosciences are often referred to as "key" or "enabling" since they can pervade almost all technological sectors and accordingly are expected to influence almost all industries in the twenty-first century. These sectors include medical applications, information technology, energy production and storage, manu-facturing, instrumentation, and environmental applica¬tions. Accordingly, nanotechnol-ogy is seen as one of the most important fields of innovation and technology today. Applications in nanotechnology typically build upon the special features and functions of nanomaterials and nanostructures, in particular due to the enhanced surface to volume ratio. Thus, nanotechnology does not constitute a product per se but is typically present and integrated in a large variety of different applications in a large number of in¬dustrial sectors. It there¬fore can be understood as an enabler of innovative technolo¬gies and applications by substituting and improving existing products or leading to funda¬mentally new products.
In order to support the exploitation of the expected potential of nanotechnology and the nanosciences, large amounts have been invested in development. Worldwide, the re-spective private and public investment was around €9 billion in 2005. The most impor-tant investors are Europe (€2.5 billion), Japan (€2.7 billion), and the United States (€3.5 billion). Considering funding and investment, the world market being influenced by nanotechnology has been estimated to be in the range between €100 and €1,000 billion between 2005 and 2015. One market estimate for 2015 even approaches US$ 3,000 billion for manufactured goods incorporating nanotechnology, which would be a significant percentage of the world gross national product (GDP in 2007 was about US$50,000 billion).
For a number of years the European Commission has adopted various initiatives to support the development of nanotechnology and the nanosciences. In 2004 the Euro-pean Commission released a communication presenting its strategy for nanotechnol-ogy, followed by the resulting Action Plan 2005-2009, then the first implementa¬tion report in 2007, and a second implementation report in October 2009.
The im¬portance of nanotechnology and cooperation with countries outside the Euro-pean Union (Third Countries, which are neither Member nor Associated States), includ-ing Russia, is pointed out in these early EU strategy documents as an important part of the European strategy. Accordingly, the 2009 work programme of NMP (the Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and New Production Technologies theme, the EU's main instrument for funding research) included a coordinated call with Russia for grant proposals on nanotechnology-based sensors with a total EU funding of €4.65 million and comparable funding from the Russian Federation. The call requested pro-posals in three separate areas of research: optical-chemical sensing with nanoparticles, nano-waveguides and photonic structures; wireless surface acoustic wave physical sensors for operation in a wide temperature range; sensing of toxic and explosive agents in air based on metal-oxide semiconductor nano-structured materials.
A further topic was specified in another coordination call - a support action on the "mapping of nanotechnology and nano-structured materials research infrastructures in Russia." The NANORUCER project was selected from this call.
NANORUCER carried out an analysis of strengths and weaknesses of the Russian nanotechnology innovations system and a mapping of research activities in Russia on nanotechnology and nano-structured materials. A systematic comparison with corre-sponding EU activities will allow to identify opportunities for future EU-Russia coopera-tion.
The overall aim of the NANORUCER support activity was to pave the way for future cooperation between the EU and the Russian Federation in the field of nanotechnology and nano-structured materials (NN) as formulated in the description of the NMP work programme topic addressed.
The following three objectives were set to deliver to this overall aim through corre-sponding work packages as described below:
Objective 1: Mapping of nanotechnology and nano-structured materials activities in Russia
In order to achieve this objective we have designed work packages 1, 2 an 3. During WP 1 the methodological and analytical framework for the mapping exercise was de-veloped. Within WP 2 an overview performance analysis of NN activities in Russia and other countries was conducted, and WP 3 was concerned with the field work in Russia for fine mapping its NN activities.
Objective 2: Assessing the capacities of Russian NN R&D activities in order to identify strengths and weaknesses
WP 4 was concerned with the assessment of the Russian NN R&D capacities and de-livered to this objective.
Objective 3: Identifying opportunities for cooperation and developing recommendations and a specific action plan
For achieving this objective it is necessary to compare Russian NN activities with re-spective activities in European countries and to use this comparison for identifying those opportunities for cooperation where both partners would benefit most. Accordingly during WP 5 European NN activities were summarized based on already available information using the same analytical framework as in WP 4. Following, WP 6 was concerned with the elaboration of opportunities for cooperation and the development of recommendations and a concrete action plan.
Project Results:
Approach
The methodological approach is based on the concept of Sectoral Innovation Systems (SIS), developed by Franco Malerba . Malerba defines a SIS as a "set of new and es-tablished products for specific uses and the set of agents carrying out mar¬ket and non-market interactions for the creation, production and sale of those products. A SIS has a knowledge base, technologies, inputs and an (existing and poten¬tial) demand. The agents composing the sectoral system are organisations and individuals (e.g. consum-ers, entrepreneurs, scientists). Organisations may be firms (e.g. users, pro¬ducers and input suppliers) and non-firm organisations (e.g. universities, financial institu¬tions, gov-ernment agencies, trade-unions, or technical associations), including sub-units of larger organisations (e.g. R&D or production departments) and groups of organisations (e.g. industry associations). The SIS approach tries to explain the creation, transfer, and implementation of knowledge and innovations in a sector. It helps to understand the institutional boundaries of a sector, the key players and their interactions, and the knowledge base and innovation processes specific to a sector. The SIS model focuses on the systemic failures that are of specific importance to all actors. The SIS in nanotechnology is an emerging system. For emerging systems, it is most important to explain the emergence and evolution of the system, capacity building within the system, as well as the imbalances and frictions, which hamper knowledge production, transfer, and commercialization.
Based on this concept an analytical framework comprised of the following elements has been developed within NANORUCER: approaches and strategies for structuring the field, indicators for mapping the Russian NN system of innovation, sources to be used for the empirical work and tools for the empirical part of the study.
A first step for structuring the field was the elaboration of a suitable definition and de-lineation of nanotechnology. Until now there is still no unified and internationally ac-cepted clear definition of nanotechnology. In order to be consistent with the perform-ance analysis carried out within NANORUCER, we applied the definition of the Euro-pean Patent Office (EPO) (Scheu et al. 2006 ): "The term nanotechnology covers enti-ties with a controlled geometrical size of at least one functional component below 100 nm in one or more dimensions susceptible to make physical, chemical or biological effects available which are intrinsic to that size. It covers equipment and methods for controlled analyses, manipulation, processing, fabrication or measurement with a pre-cision below 100 nm."
As a tool for gathering and presenting in a systematic way activities of research organi-sations or firms in the nanotechnology and nano-structured materials research (NN) area, a competence matrix was developed which characterises the NN field along two dimensions: applications and markets for results of NN R&D activities and sub-technologies and -functions of NN.
For the analysis of publications and patent applications in nanotechnology during the performance analysis of NANORUCER search strategies for the respective data have been developed. In the case of patent analyses, relevant documents were identified in the databases of the EPO by retrieving patent applications which had been assigned a specific tag, labelling all those patents which are relevant for nanotechnology. The EPO assigns this Y01N tag to all respective patent applications and updates it continuously. The nanotechnology patent family is subdivided into six fields: nanobiotechnology; nanotechnology for information processing; storage and transmission; nanotechnology for materials and surface science; nanotechnology for interacting; sensing or actuating; nanooptics and nanomagnetics. For elaborating a search strategy for publications in nanotechnology several published approaches were compared. Finally, a key word-based search using the prefix "nano" was used for the analysis.
The two core parts of the mapping of the NN SIS in Russia comprise the mapping of universities and research organisations and the mapping of companies active in NN. For characterising these actors two sets of indicators have been developed: a set of input indicators which provide information on the resources, the internal strengths and the framework conditions for doing nanotechnology R&D and production, and a set of output indicators which are used for capturing the performance dimension. Input indica-tors refer, for example, to available facilities, human resources in terms of number, qualification, level of expertise, type of position and age and funding, including differen-tiation between private and public sources and characterisation of the different types of sources. Output indicators refer to scientific performance as measured by publication counts or contributions to scientific conferences or membership in review panels. The networking within scientific communities is considered, for example, by measuring in-volvement in external projects. Technological performance is measured by patent ap-plications. Technology transfer activities are reflected, for example, by the number of spin-off companies. In the case of industry, additional output measures were used re-lated to commercial activities. These include economic data such as turnover, share of exports or market shares, but also product- and service-specific indicators related to R&D activities, production, marketing, distribution and services provided.
Specific tools have been developed for the NANORUCER field work. For mapping of NN activities of research organisations, universities and companies, questionnaires have been developed, one specific questionnaire for the research institutions and uni-versities and another one for companies. Both questionnaires are structured in the fol-lowing way:
* Section 1 with general information about the organisation
* Section 2 aiming at characterising the NN activities
* Section 3 concentrating on the resources such as human capital, financing or funding and facilities
* Section 4 concerned with information about the various activities of the organi-sations in the NN field
* Section 5 asking for current bottlenecks and possible solutions for the further development and application of NN in Russia
In order to obtain a complete picture of the nanotechnology SIS in Russia, NANORUCER did not only focus on research organisations and companies active in nanotechnology. Rather, other important domains of the SIS are included in the map-ping. In particular this refers to private funding activities in terms of venture capital, in-novation infrastructure and policy-making and implementation. For gathering informa-tion from venture capital firms, incubators and funding agencies, information guidelines were developed which focus on a limited number of key elements in order to improve participation and response in the mapping activities.
The Europe SIS in NN was assessed using existing data. A set of input and output variables was used for that purpose. The analysis focuses on a comparison of the EU with Asia and the USA (and partly Russia) with respect to funding (public and private), research infrastructures and clusters, and cooperation with Third Countries as input indicators and publications (scientific publications and technology patents), market data, and commercialisation activities (e.g. in terms of products, companies and human resources) as output indicators. These few but important indicators allow for a rough but representative overview of the current EU position in the global context. The as-sessment was validated during an expert-workshop on March 25th 2011 in Brussels.
The identification of topics suggested for future cooperation between European and Russian groups in NN is based on various strands of NANORUCER research. We started with a performance analysis of R&D activities in NN in European countries and Russia, using bibliometric and patent indicators. This analysis allowed to identify spe-cialisation patterns of Russia compared to other regions of the world. A second core activity within NANORUCER was the mapping of the Russian nanotechnology SIS. Key actors of the nanotechnology innovation system could be identified and in particular their competences and interest in future cooperation could be elaborated. All in all 84 R&D organisations and 50 companies suggested topics for future cooperation. Thirdly, the European situation in NN was analysed based on already available information from other projects and studies. Thereby European competences could be assessed in a SWOT analysis. Fourthly, a very important contribution to the identification of future opportunities for cooperation was made by representatives of the Russian nanotech-nology research communities during two NANORUCER workshops in Moscow held in January 2011 and April 2011. A final strand of information was the assessment by European experts which was carried out during a workshop in Brussels in March 2011, followed by a series of personal interviews in order to assess cooperation opportunities.
In order to select core topics for future cooperation the following set of criteria was
applied:
* Competences and capacities: Cooperation would only be meaningful if both partners could contribute required competences in the fields under consideration and also the needed capacities in terms of human resources, equipment and infrastructures.
* Synergies: Competences and capacities of cooperation partners should be com-bined in a way which allows taking advantage of synergies.
* Mutual benefit: The benefit from cooperation should not be one-sided but rather be generated for both parts of the cooperation in a comparable way.
* Competitive advantage: Via cooperation a position of competitive advantage should be achieved by the cooperation parties which for example should also consider the potential to secure knowledge by IPR.
* High impact: Cooperation topics should have the potential to contribute to handling grand challenges, thereby generating future economic, social or environmental im-pact.
* Different time perspectives: Topics should be differentiated along the timeline and include short-term (2-4 years), medium-term (4-6 years) and long-term (7-10 years) activities.
For describing the opportunities for cooperation a strategic framework was developed. Accordingly topics were mapped along three main dimensions:
* Innovation areas related to grand challenges
* The enabling dimension including components, process-means, methods, nano-structures and nanomaterials, tools, models and equipment
* Scientific disciplines.
Overview: performance in NN
The performance analysis consists of two main parts. The first part is concerned with the analysis of scientific publications covering an overall analysis of NN but also the analysis of NN subfields. The second part comprises a patent analysis in NN. For that purpose patent applications at the European Patent Office were analysed.
Publication analysis
In order to obtain a first overview of worldwide publication activities in nanotechnology, we retrieved all publications during the period 2000-2009 from the SCI and analysed the contributions of different world regions to the total publication counts. Accordingly, the Asian region as defined by the most active countries Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, India and Singapore was publishing most nanotechnology papers, achieving a share of 41 per cent of the total of 432,004 publications identified by the search strategy used. Europe, defined as EU15 , contributed about 30 per cent and the United States 25 per cent of total publications. Russia obtained a considerable share of 4 per cent of all worldwide publications.
Scientific activities in nanotechnology as measured by publication output developed very dynamically over the ten-years-period considered. On a world level the number of publications increased by a factor of 3.5 between 2000 and 2009. The worldwide growth of nanotechnology publications is in particular remarkable if we compare it to the development of all worldwide publications which increased only by a factor of 1.3 over the ten-years-period considered. The most dynamic region was Asia where we observe an increase by a factor of almost 5.5 during this period. The Asian growth is mainly driven by China, Korea, India and Taiwan, while we observe a less dynamic development in Japan. But also in the USA, Europe (EU15) and Russia publication activities grew considerably during the last ten years. While the USA could almost triple its publication output, in the case of Russia we observe a doubling of the number of publications.
An important goal of the performance analysis was to identify focal points of research activities in different nanotechnology subareas in Russia compared to European and world regions. For that purpose we divide the total field of nanotechnology into the fol-lowing subfields: nanochemistry, nanophysics, nanomaterials, nanoengineering, multid-isciplinary nanoactivities, nanobio, nanomedicine, nanooptics and nanomodelling. As indicated by publication activities these fields vary considerably in size. We observe three large fields - nanomaterials, nanophysics and nanochemistry making together more than 70 per cent of all nanotechnology publications. On the other hand, nano-modelling and nanooptics belong to the smaller fields contributing 0.4 and 1.1 per cent, respectively to all publications. The other fields range between 4.1 and 8.6 per cent.
Specialisation of different regions within the described nanotechnology subfields were analysed by calculating the share of publications in nano subfields in all publications of the respective regions. Accordingly, Russia seems to be different from the other world regions in terms of focal activities mainly in two ways. Firstly, looking at the smaller fields there is a much stronger focus on nanooptics in Russia, while nanomedicine seems to be less important. Concerning the larger fields, Russia has the strongest focus on nanophysics compared to the other regions of the world.
In summary, this analysis could provide some first hints for potential fields of future cooperations. In the case of fields where Russia is an important player in the European context in terms of publication output (nanophysics, nanooptics, nanomodelling), we would expect a rather high number of potential subfields and research groups from Russia being interested in offering cooperation opportunities. On the other hand, in the smaller fields which are mainly concerned with the intersection of nanotechnology and life sciences, identifying potential themes and partners in Russia for cooperation might be more difficult.
Patent analyses
In order to obtain an overview of the contribution of different world regions to world-wide patenting activities in nanotechnology, we analysed the contribution of different regions to world-wide patent applications at the European Patent Office including EP and PCT applications over a 10-years period (1997-2006).
The United States turned out to be the most active contributor to patenting activities achieving a share of about one third of all patent applications. Europe defined as EU15 contributed almost 28 per cent of all patent applications, a similar share as the Asian countries with roughly 26 per cent. Russia obtained a share of 0.7 per cent of all patent applications. If we compare this share of Russia with the corresponding share of Russia in publication activities (4 per cent, figure 1), the propensity to patenting in Russia seems to be much lower compared to publication propensities. About 12 per cent of all patent applications were contributed by the rest of the world (RoW).
When analysing the dynamics of patent applications in nanotechnology in different world regions we observe a rather strong growth of patenting activities on a world level between 1997 and 2005 where patent applications grew by a factor of roughly 3.5. To-wards 2006 patenting activities seem to drop again. Due to the high share of the USA in all patent applications, the worldwide dynamics is strongly influenced by the behaviour of the United States. For this region we observe a very strong growth of patenting activities by a factor of 8 between 1997 and 2004 followed by a considerable drop to-wards the year 2006. The dynamics of patenting activities in Europe and Asian coun-tries is similar to the worldwide activities. In the case of Russia we observe a rather stable development with no remarkable growth.
The worldwide decline of nanotechnology patent applications between 2004 and 2006 which is driven largely by the patenting behaviour of the United States seems to be a specific phenomenon for nanotechnology since patenting activities over all technologies continued to increase during this period at the world level and also at the level of the United States.
In order to analyse patenting activities of Russia and other world regions in different subfields of nanotechnology, we differentiate nanotechnology into six subareas: nano-materials, nanoelectronics, nanooptics, nanobiotech, nanomechanics, nanomagnetics. These fields have been defined by the EPO and cover different categories of the inter-national patent classification (IPC). Accordingly they can be used for analysing subfield-specific patenting behaviour. Nanomaterials comprises the largest of these subareas corresponding to 35 per cent of the 17.359 total nanotechnology patent applications worldwide over the period 1997 to 2006. Nanoelectronics with 26 per cent is another larger area. Nanooptics and nanobiotech each contribute 12 per cent, nanomechanics 9 per cent and nanomagnetics 6 per cent of the worldwide total nanotechnology patent applications.
For a detailed analysis of the relative specialisation of Russia in different nanotechnol-ogy fields, we calculated the patent specialisation indicator RTA. Basically, this indicator relates the share of patent applications of a specific country in a specific field to the share of all patent applications of this country in all patent applications world-wide. Thereby, this indicator provides information on relative specialisation of different coun-tries, compensating for size effects and different propensities to patenting. This analysis indicates that Russia presents a clear specialisation in nanooptics and nanomechanics. None of the other three major regions considered is characterised by a similar specialisation pattern. Nanobiotechnology, on the other hand, is the subfield where Russia is not specialised in. Interestingly, the Asian countries express a similar under-specialisation in nanobiotechnology.
In summary, the performance analysis indicates that Russia is an important player in the world-wide scientific nanotechnology community. With respect to scientific activi-ties, we observe a clear specialisation of Russia in two subfields of nanotechnology, namely nanooptics and nanophysics. On the other hand, the intersection between nanotechnology and life sciences as defined by the scientific fields nanomedicine and nanobiotechnology is a field were we observe lower intensities of scientific activities in Russia. Thus, the analysis of scientific performance using bibliometric indicators gives some first ideas about potential nanotechnology subfields for future cooperation be-tween Russia and European countries. The fields of nanooptics and nanophysics, where we observe a clear specialisation of Russia are also areas where most European countries present rather intensive activities. Accordingly, we would expect a number of interesting opportunities for cooperation within these larger subfields. On the other hand, life sciences-related nanotechnology research could be an area where European countries and Russia could contribute complementary competencies for joint activities, combining rather intensive strong European research activities with currently lower and more focussed Russian activities.
The Russian SIS in NN
The mapping of the Russian SIS in NN comprises the following elements:
Gathering information about the main actors of the Russian NN innovation system; setting up the database structure for the different types of actors; analysis and mapping of information collected by scientific NN subfields and regions of the Russian Federa-tion; developing of databases for R&D organisations, research infrastructure centres, business incubators, venture funds and nano companies; elaboration of maps of the distribution of the different actor types across the regions of the Russian Federation.
With respect to research organisations two databases were set up. The first database of R&D organisations in NN is structured into the following sub-directories:
D1: name of organisation
D2: contact information
D3: contact person
D4: location
D5: fields of NN
D6: type of organisation (academic research institute, university, organisation of minis-tries and agencies, organisation of branch science transformed during the privatisation, private research organisation)
D7: year of foundation
D8: human capacities (staff number, number of R&D personnel, differentiation of R&D personnel into post-doctoral degree holders and PhD holders)
D9: facilities available at the organisation (open field)
This database provides a comprehend overview of research organisations of the Rus-sian Federation which carry out R&D in NN. Over 700 organisations are included from large well-known research institutes to small emerging units. Organisations are spread over all regions ("okrugs") of the Russian Federation. Analysing the type of organisa-tions indicates that 28 per cent belong to the academic sector, represented by the or-ganisations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, the Russian Academy of Architecture and Building, the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and by the research institute of all regional branches of the Rus-sian Academy of Sciences. The university sector comprises the largest share of all R&D organisations containing information on over 280 organisations, corresponding to 41 per cent of the total. The third largest sector comprises organisations of ministries and agencies including state research centres which got this status in the middle of the 19th of the last century and are oriented mainly on applied studies and public research organisations which perform under the umbrella of federal ministries and agencies or under the umbrella of regional authorities. In this group we have available information of about 100 organisations.
Looking at the regional distribution of the organisations we observe a strong concentra-tion in the central federal "okrug" which is Moscow and the region around Moscow, where about 50 per cent of all organisations are located. This concentration of NN ac-tivities around Moscow is in line with the general trends of regional distribution of Rus-sian science and has its historical roots.
As a second database, a target database, of R&D organisations was elaborated based on information collected via a survey of R&D organisations in Russia. For the survey the 700 organisations identified for the first database were asked to provide more de-tailed information about their activities in NN. In addition to the basic structural and or-ganisational information about the research organisations, the survey revealed struc-tured information about activities in different nanotechnology fields, in different applica-tion areas of nanotechnology and also asked for assessments of framework conditions for doing nanotechnology research in Russia. In addition, organisations were asked to propose topics for future joint research activities between Russian and European re-search groups. Finally, detailed information about available facilities in the institutes and also lists of references were provided. Over 80 organisations of all types located in all federal "okrugs" participated in the survey. It turned out that the academic sector was more active in answering the questionnaires compared to universities. Therefore, about 40 per cent of the sample is represented by the academic sector, about 28 per cent by universities. Concerning the regional distribution we find the same concentration of organisations on the Moscow regions as already observed for the database of research organisations.
Most of the organisations are active in the area of nanomaterials which corresponds with the observations made during the performance analysis, indicating that nanomate-rials and nanophysics belong to the strong points of Russian nanotechnology R&D ac-tivities. Interestingly, a rather large share of the institutes indicates to be active in the area of nanobiotechnology. However, a more detailed analysis of these data indicates that in many cases this orientation reflects more the expected future position of the institutes than the current activities. This may be an indication of the high expectations which are set into this area by a large share of the Russian nanotechnology R&D or-ganisations.
In summary, the mapping of research organisations in nanotechnology in Russia pro-vided a broad and detailed information basis for the identification of interesting topics and themes for future cooperation. The database is available on the NANORUCER website: www.nanorucer.eu.
In a comparable way to R&D organisations also for industrial enterprises two data-bases were set up. The first database of nano companies relies mainly on secondary information published by different actors of the Russian and the international nanotechnology arena. Most important sources for setting up the databases were the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, RUSNANO, the National Nanotech Network, regional authorities and regional nanotech networks, information from the European Union, Internet sources, conference proceedings and information published in scientific journals. As an additional important source of information we could use the survey of R&D organisations. R&D organisations were also asked whether they had set up start-up companies in the nanotech area. Thereby we could identify 28 spin-offs from different research institutes and universities. The database was arranged into the following directories: D1 company name, D2 location and con-tact, D3 contact person, D4 function of contact person. The companies were also mapped across the federal okrugs of the Russian Federation and the subjects.
All in all, the database of nano companies contained more than 410 companies entries, including large well-known cooperations as well as small emerging spin-offs. Concern-ing the regional distribution we observe a strong concentration in the Moscow region which is comparable to the concentration of R&D organisations. Roughly 50 per cent of the companies are located in this area. Behind Moscow the second important location is the St. Petersburg region were roughly 50 companies are located.
The second database, the target database of nano companies, was set up using addi-tional information provided by a survey of nano companies carried out within NANORUCER. The target database contains the following information:
D1: name of organisation,
D2: location,
D3: contact person,
D4: contact information,
D5: foundation year,
D6: year of start of nanotechnology activities,
D7: type of activities (R&D, production, service, marketing and distribution),
D8: founders of company,
D9: products
D10: main markets in terms of industrial sectors such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, aerospace, transport, ICT,
D11: human resources,
D12: technological fields.
All in all, the target database contains detailed information of about roughly 50 nano companies in Russia. About 60 per cent of the companies are spin-offs from academia, more than 90 per cent of the companies provide R&D services in NN. Many of the companies also suggested topics for collaborative projects with the European partners. The database is available on the NANORUCER website: www.nanorucer.eu.
In addition to the main databases (R&D organisations and companies) within NANORUCER also databases of other important actors of the Russian nanotechnology SIS were elaborated:
* a database with information about 128 research infrastructure centres,
* a database with 33 business incubators,
* a database with 102 technology transfer centres and
* a database with 14 venture funds.
Assessment of the European and the Russian SIS in NN
Europe
The global distribution of R&D investments, publications and patents indicate that nanotechnology related research and development activities are concentrated in a few countries and regions of the world. The United States dominates in this context, fol-lowed by Japan and some of the larger EU countries (Germany, France, UK). Nonethe-less, some smaller countries also show up as being very active when considering size differences across countries (OECD 2009 ).
With respect to nanotechnology funding, the EU is quite strong and comparable to other world regions, like USA and Asia. Available data on public funding and regional centres of nanotechnology activity suggest that the EU and its Member States are competitive overall, even though there were time lags in the provision of public funds in the early years of this decade (EURONANO 2009 ). In addition there are problems concerning implementation of public funding. These include, for example, fragmenta-tion and parallelisation. There are many examples where parallel activities are funded by public money producing redundant results at all levels (local, regional, federal, European). Another problem concerns a lack of a focussed strategy for funding along the complete innovation chain. Basically the instruments are available for doing so, the money is there, however, coordination is lacking and accessibility is difficult. A more focussed and strategic funding approach would require identifying the key bottlenecks along the innovation chain and direct suitable funding instruments to those. Europe does not provide private funding (in particular venture capital) to the same extent as other regions like the US or Japan, which may hint to a worse performance in terms of commercialisation of nanotechnology.
Research infrastructures are excellent and strongly supported in the EU, technology platforms and cluster activities are visible but could be coordinated and complement better with other activities and stakeholders for sake of defragmentation and improved synergies. Cooperation among the EU Member States as well as with Third Coun-tries has been established in the past but will be of more importance in areas of joint global thematic and strategic interest and will have to be further developed (e.g. for regulation, standardisation, risk assessment, etc.).
Science and technology indicators remain the most reliable source of information for assessing the competitive position of world regions and countries. The EU Member States perform well in terms of R&D, especially with respect to scientific activity measured by publications. In terms of technology development measured by patents, the EU performance is solid yet not as strong as on the science side. While EU Member States are often on par with the US, nano-electronics is an area of relative weakness. The US remains the main competitor across all relevant areas. However, the rapid entry of "newcomer" countries such as BRIC countries and the South-East Asian countries should also be highlighted. All of these countries are characterised by rapid growth rates in the number of publications and patents although from low starting levels. These results suggest that the thrust of nanotechnology R&D may partly be shifting away from traditional countries which have had a longer history of involvement in nanotechnology (EURONANO 2009 , OECD 2009 ).
Typical of an emerging field, the level of uncertainty is high and there is considerable variety in market estimates. While these factors are not restricted to nanotechnologies, they must be taken into consideration when interpreting data. The potential socio-economic impacts of nanotechnology are considered very large especially in terms of forecast market size for nanotechnology-related products, the multiplicity of applica-tions and their potential to contribute to addressing global challenges (OECD 2009 ). The USA is the strongest actor bringing nanotechnology products into the market, fol-lowed by Asia and the EU. With respect to firm/company creation also the USA are leading world wide, however, Europe as a further player with substantial activity on the level of individual Member States. However, reliable assessments of these socio-economic impacts still suffer from a lack of indicators and statistics, jointly agreed defi-nitions of nanotechnology and methodologies for its measurement. Available market forecasts, company and nanotechnology product inventories are only indicative while technology roadmaps are difficult to undertake due to the broadness of the field (OECD 2009 ). The EU has great strengths in different sectors such as transport, energy, chemistry, materials; manufacturing, and medicine, where nanotechnology plays an important role and scientific strengths of the EU can be identified.
Besides the discussed indicators for measuring R&D performance and competitive-ness, a number of key factors have to be mentioned, which are highly relevant for the future commercialisation and acceptance of nanotechnology:
Technology transfer between academia and industry is particularly important for nanotechnology. Due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of NN, this is more compli-cated compared to other technologies. The main challenge here is to balance undi-rected basic research aiming at pure scientific progress with a view on commercialisa-tion prospects and the specific needs of users and markets. Direct collaboration be-tween science and industry often helps in this respect, but raises the issue of how intel-lectual property is assigned to the individual partners (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). If Europe is to operate as a single market for knowledge, it is not enough simply to increase public investment in research. Rather, it is important to create a framework that facilitates knowledge transfer by removing the barriers hindering collaboration between research and industry (EC 2009a ).
With respect to the market demand, users typically do not adopt new technology solely based on their technical superiority but rather on a price-cost advantage over established technologies, taking into account issues such as safety, compatibility to other products and existing production processes, and acceptance by their own clients (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). Creating new markets, however, with nanotechnology will change the game, but breakthrough products are needed (blockbusters, not otherwise achiev-able). As for any newly emerging technology, potential impacts of nanotechnology on environment, health, safety (EHS) have been discussed widely, since there is a widespread concern of potential negative effects from nanotechnology (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). Investment in nanomaterials EHS risk research must be maintained or pref-erably increased to US levels to ensure that Europe remains competitive with respect to developments in global regulations (EAG 2009 ). There is evidence that the US is investing in research into the environment, health and safety risks of engineered nanomaterials at annual rate that is three times the European level (EAG 2009 ).
Within the EC's Public Online Consultation on Nanotechnology experts and the general public identified many benefits in nanotechnologies, as well as potential risks (EC 2010 ). More than 80 per cent have either high or reasonable expectations of nanotechnologies in general, but some areas are seen as more promising than others, with regard to their expected benefits and potential risks: ICT and energy are seen as the areas of application where the benefits far outweigh any potential risks. Applications in aerospace, construction, sustainable chemistry, security and environment are seen as areas that would bring high benefits. Applications in agriculture, food and household items are regarded with more scepticism, although potential benefits in these areas were also identified. Applications in healthcare are universally seen as very promising, but there is a strong perception of potential risks (EC 2010 ).
Commercialising nanotechnology products broadly will require acceptance (and trust) by users and all other parties that may be concerned by nanotechnology products. As-sessing and minimising perceived risk potentials are important activities. Certainty about regulatory issues is also critical for nanotechnology producers to decide about investment and directions of future research (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). In order to enhance commercialisation prospects of new nanotechnology applications, measurement and testing methods have to be developed and validated. Clearly, infrastructures have a key enabling role in supporting this research. Based on this, standards have to be implemented and an effective regulatory framework should be put in place that takes into account EHS concerns, while at the same time acknowledges the progress that nanotechnology innovations can have for the environment and health. An open dia-logue between governments, industry, research and the wider society should address EHS concerns and how these are dealt with (ZEW/TNO 2010 ). Demand is also high for requirements to ensure that adequate information is provided on consumer products (EC 2010 ).
On the other hand, there is a good or very good perception of EU governance related to nanotechnologies in terms of stakeholder consultation and setting research priorities (EC 2010 ). The Commission is also heavily involved in the current work within the OECD Working Party for Manufactured Nanomaterials (WPMN), which is developing test methods and guidelines for risk assessment and regulation. Moreover, the ISO standardisation work will facilitate a global convergence in standards for the implementation of regulation (EC 2009a ).
Russia
The analysis of the Russian SIS in NN is based mainly on the information elaborated during the mapping of the Russian NN SIS during NANORUCER. In particular the da-tabases and surveys described above formed valuable sources of information. In addi-tion, more than 200 interviews with managers of incubators, of venture funds or venture management companies were carried out. Statistical information from the State Statis-tical Committee of the Russian Federation, from the Ministry of Education and Science and from the Russian corporation RUSNANO could also be analysed for the assess-ment. This national information was complemented by available international sources provided, for example, by the OECD and by the European Commission. The analysis reveals the following main findings:
Currently the Russian SIS in NN is looking for new trajectories. It is marked by diver-sity and by a lack of coherence in different nanotechnology fields, with respect to dif-ferent actors and also to strategic decisions in its current early and developing stage. Particular strengths of the Russian educational and R&D system in physics, chemis-try and material sciences as well as a long standing tradition in nanoscale research, provide a good background for the future development of the NN-related SIS. Cur-rently, the Russian SIS in NN can be characterised as a growing system with rapid institutional changes, emerging systems of governance and a geopolitical orientation mostly towards the European Union.
Key players in the Russian NN SIS are the Federal Ministry for Education and Sci-ence, the RUSNANO corporation and the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the re-search area only a few universities are playing an important role. The RUSNANO cor-poration is a rather new player but has been developing very rapidly into a strong or-ganisation with global orientation.
Still, the Russian SIS in NN remains fragmented and misbalanced. We observe a rather strong R&D system which on the other hand is opposed to an underdeveloped financial and innovation system, less developed infrastructures, and accordingly a less developed nano market. In order to deal with these imbalances at the federal and re-gional level, new institutions have emerged for the coordination of different political bodies and for facilitating a dialogue between different stakeholders. However, strong departmental interests and path dependencies hamper the transition to a new model of policy development and implementation in NN.
Activities of public bodies are mainly oriented towards the development of research infrastructure, towards closing institutional gaps in the SIS and towards further develop-ing human capacity. In this respect, such activities can be considered as comparable to other European countries. In particular public investment in NN development increased substantially after the presidential nanotechnology initiative was launched in 2007.
A main problem of the Russian SIS in NN is the private sector, in a sense that it does not provide significant contributions to knowledge generation. A non-competitive and monopolised home market, a non-effective system of technical regulations as well as a lack of in-house R&D capacity undermine the private sectors' motivation.
The institutional set up of the SIS in NN is well developed, however, most R&D ca-pacities are concentrated in the academic sector. Remarkably, academia provides R&D in all NN fields. However, strong imbalances could be observed. Namely there is rather large R&D capacity concentrated in the area of nanomaterials, while life-sciences-related fields are less dynamic. In basic research Russian nanoscience is still considered to be among the world's leading players, although new actors are emerging and competing increasingly with the Russian situation. These include in particular Asian countries, such as China, South Korea or Singapore.
The home market related to NN is dominated by foreign companies. The majority of Russian companies are small and medium-sized enterprises and spin-offs of academia. Administrative barriers, high-credit interest and lack of qualified personnel hamper business development in these small nano companies. Emerging companies already export nano-enabled products and have strong ambitions to expand their world market niche. However, a lack of experience and lack of public support impede such activities. These problems in commercial development of nanotechnology in Russia not least are influenced by cultural issues, since in general Russian R&D organisations do not have a tradition of commercialising research results. Among others a weak emphasis on generating IPR and strong patent portfolios among academia support this notion.
Opportunities for cooperation
Following the approach described in the first section a total of seventeen core topics was identified which have been classified into seven fields (table 1). Each topic is de-scribed with a short one or two-page profile summarising the main features of the topic according to the described dimensions (for details see deliverable 6.4). Finally a road-map is developed positioning the topics along the timescale and indicating short-term, medium-term or long-term opportunities for cooperation.
Table 1: Overview of core topics
Nanometals
1 Plasma technology for production of metallic nanoparti-cles/-structures
2 Metallic nanoporous filters/membranes
3 Nanometals for extreme conditions
4 Superhard/-tough composites with superconducting properties
5 Vacuum-tight X-ray transparent Beryllium components
Nanoceramics
6 Process technology for nanoceramics
7 Electroceramics
8 Coatings for high-temperature shielding
9 Shielding materials for electromagnetic radiation
Carbon-based materials
10 Nanocarbon-based sensors (e.g. CNT, graphene)
Nanomagnets
11 Nanomagnets and their optimized production
12 Electronics/electronic devices based on spintronics
Sensors and Instruments
13 Plasmonic sensors and devices
14 Advanced UHV-setup for analysing and modelling surface reactions for nanoelectronic devices
Superconductivity
15 Theory for nanoscale enhanced high-temperature superconductivity
16 Nano-analysis and applications for superconducting de-vices
Quantum computing
17 Theoretical models for quantum computing
Conclusions
The performance analysis carried out within NANORUCER indicates that scientific activities in nanotechnology as measured by publication output increased very rapidly worldwide during the last ten years. We observe an average growth rate of nanotech-nology publications of 3.5 compared to an average growth rate of 1.3 over all scientific disciplines. The dynamics of nanotechnology publications is mainly driven by Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, China, India and Singapore) and the United States, while in terms of overall publishing activities EU15 is the second most active region with a share of 30 per cent of all publications compared to 41 per cent for Asia and 25 per cent for the USA. Russia is an important player in the world-wide scientific nanotechnology community. With respect to scientific activities, we observe a clear specialisation of Russia in two subfields of nanotechnology, namely nanooptics and nanophysics. On the other hand, the intersection between nanotechnology and life sci-ences is a field were we observe lower intensities of scientific activities in Russia. Thus, the analysis of scientific performance using bibliometric indicators gives some first ideas about potential nanotechnology subfields for future cooperation between Russia and European countries. The fields of nanooptics and nanophysics, where we observe a clear specialisation of Russia are also areas where most European countries present rather intensive activities. Accordingly, we would expect a number of interesting oppor-tunities for cooperation within these larger subfields.
The patent analyses reveal only low numbers of international patents from Russia. We propose two different explanations for this situation. Firstly, if we assume that publica-tions reflect scientific activities and patent applications indicate activities concerned with applied research, technology transfer and commercialisation, we would conclude that nanotechnology activities in Russia currently are mainly focussed on basic research. Secondly, we could also assume that the low number of patents does not reflect adequately the application- and commercialisation activities in Russia. Rather, it mainly would indicate a low prospensity to protecting inventions with international patents. This could be due to lacking awareness of the role of patents, to language biases, to constraints in financing patent applications or to other reasons. In both cases we would argue for future policy support activities, however, different strategies would be needed in each case. In the first case (low intensity of applied research and commercialisation activities), the task would be to support building up applied research and commercialisation activities. In the second case (low prospensity to patenting), support-ing activities should focus more on providing information, racing the awareness of the role and significance of patent protection, providing advice in legal issues related to patenting, and finally supporting patenting activities financially.
The analysis of the Russian SIS in NN reveals the following strong points: the level of education in particular in the disciplines mathematics, physics, chemistry and material sciences is high in the international context. We also observe a broad science base in nanotechnology-related research based on physical sciences. These include nanoop-tics, nanomaterials and nanophysics. The institutional set up of R&D organisations is well developed. There are more than 700 organisations with activities in nanotechnol-ogy. Most of these belong to the Russian Academy of Sciences. Also infrastructures for nanotechnology-related research are well in place. Not least since the recent initiative on nanotechnology of the Russian presidency there is a growing policy support for nanotechnology in terms of funding and in terms of new initiatives for innovation. An-other important driving force of nanotechnology in Russia is the corporation RUSNANO which has been established during the last years as a global player aiming at supporting the commercialisation of nanotechnology. Finally, the geopolitical orientation of Russia is mostly towards the European Union which forms another positive condition for future cooperation in NN.
On the other hand, we also observe a number of weak points of the Russian SIS in NN. These include fragmentation and misbalances between the different constituents of the innovation system. In particular, there is a strong imbalance between activities related to R&D and activities related to innovation, the latter still being rather weak. Concerning different areas of nanotechnology, nanotechnology research related to life sciences has only been emerging recently. Science-industry interaction is rather weak. The private sector provides only low contribution to knowledge generation. In particular, we observe only a low level of in-house R&D activities. Also with respect to innovation activities, the private sector presents a rather weak performance as measured, for example, in the number of patent applications or the number of innovative products. Systems for technical regulations and also the financial infrastructure are developed rather weakly in Russia.
Strong points of the European SIS in NN include public funding, not least by the Euro-pean Union and the available research infrastructures. Also the research base in par-ticular in nanooptics-, nanophysics-, biotechnology- and biomedicine-related nanotech-nology can be considered as strong. The institutional framework is well developed. This includes legislation, activities related to environmental, health and safety (EHS) issues, risk assessment activities and joint activities towards standardisation. Since nanotech-nology at a first hand will be mainly used in industrial sectors, it is also important to note that those sectors were nanotechnology is expected to exert strongest influence are very well-developed in Europe. These include the automotive industry, energy, chemistry, materials and manufacturing. Compared to the USA and also to the main Asian competitors, a number of weak points of the European SIS in NN need to be mentioned. These include private investment, in particular venture capital, and a frag-mentation of R&D and innovation activities and support, commercial performance, and also an increasing lack of highly qualified human resources.
With respect to future cooperation between Russia and the EU in NN results of the NANORUCER project allow the following conclusions. A win-win situation can be gen-erated via cooperation if complementary science bases and research infrastructures are combined. This requires that common goals need to be identified. We suggest that these could be oriented best at the grand challenges (including health, environment, energy and communication) as identified by various international organisations. Mutual benefit could be generated best if Russian competences and capacities in basic and theoretical research activities are combined with the innovation perspective and ex-perience of European R&D actors. Complementary skills could be linked up and further developed also via exchange of personnel between the two regions. In addition, further developing institutional frameworks for nanotechnology in joint activities and in a global context could be a beneficial field of action in the NN context. This includes standards, the EHS framework and regulation.
Starting from these principle considerations we suggest nanomaterials, in particular metals and ceramics, sensors and instruments as fields opening opportunities for co-operation in a short term. Nanomagnets- and nanocarbon-based applications offer mid-term opportunities. Finally, superconductivity and quantum computing provide a number of topics for mid- to long-term cooperation.
As follow-up activities of the NANORUCER project a refinement and implementation of the suggested topics into future calls of the European Union would be necessary. In addition, we also strongly propose to monitor the further development of cooperations between the European Union and the Russian Federation in NN. This could in particular contribute to mutual learning from good or best practices.
Potential Impact:
The expected impact of the NANORUCER project as described in Annex 1 (description of work) includes the following:
* Improvement of knowledge of the Russian research capacities in nanotechnology and nano-structured materials (NN),
* Provision of reliable information to pave the way for future EU-Russia cooperation in NN,
* Contribution to increasing the cooperation between European and Russian research organisations in the area of NN.
The improvement of knowledge of Russian research capacity in nanotechnology was at the heart of the NANORUCER support activity. We considered as not being sufficient just to collect and map information in a systematic way. Rather an assess-ment of the obtained information along predefined criteria was seen as crucial. For that purpose within the NANORUCER activity a set of indicators and assessment tools was developed in the very beginning and used in the following work packages. The final assessment itself was a combination of desk research, including science and technol-ogy indicators and expert assessments.
The key results which are relevant for improving the knowledge of the Russian re-search capacities in NN are documented in two databases. The first database contains detailed information of more than 80 research organisations active in NN. The second database summarises information of more than 50 companies being active in nanotechnology in Russia and providing also research capacities. Both databases are available on the NANORUCER website (www.nanorucer.eu). Search functions allow detailed searches for specific topics and research activities. Feedback from the re-search communities and also from representatives of industry indicates that both data-bases are used intensively in Russia and also in European countries.
In addition to these main databases also databases of other important actors of the Russian nanotechnology SIS were elaborated. These include a database of research infrastructure centres (128 entries), a database of business incubators (33 entries), a database of technology transfer centres (102 entries), and a database of venture funds (14 entries).
All these databases have been described in detail in various reports which have been submitted as deliverables no. 15 and 16 and which are also available on the NANORUCER website.
Based on this information but also using external sources, a careful analysis of the Russian SIS in NN has been carried out. The results of this analysis are documented in an analytical paper - Russian nanotech innovation systems: the key trends, barriers and opportunities -, which has been submitted as deliverable no. 17 and which is also available on the NANORUCER website.
In order to provide reliable information to pave the way for future EU-Russia coop-eration, the work packages of NANORUCER have been designed in a way that al-lowed a continuous interplay between data gathering and data evaluation. In particular the same analytical framework developed in work package 1 turned out to be very use-ful for analysing the situation in Russia as well as in Europe. In addition, specific work-shops were carried out to validate the results of the project team by external experts.
The information about the Russian SIS in NN as elaborated during work packages 3 and 4 was complemented by information on the European situation in NN using mainly existing literature. In addition, performance indicators relying on publications and patent applications have been gathered allowing an objective assessment of the performance of various European and other countries compared to Russia in terms of scientific ac-tivities and also in terms of activities related to technology development and commercial orientation. The results of the assessment of the European situation have been summarised in deliverable 12 - Thesis paper on European strengths and weaknesses in NN R&D. The assessment has been discussed and validated during a workshop on March 25th, 2011 in Brussels with 14 experts from scientific communities, industry and policy-making representing the countries France, United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, Swit-zerland, Germany and Russia. Results of the validation workshop have been submitted as deliverable 13.
Finally, both the situation in Europe and the situation in Russia in terms of nanotech-nology-related research have been summarised in a SWOT analysis providing a com-prehensive assessment of both sectoral innovation systems.
The NANORUCER activity will contribute to increasing cooperation between EU and Russian organisations in several ways. Firstly, the information basis about the Russian SIS in NN allows research groups from Europe and other countries to obtain a better picture of the whole NN-related SIS in Russia and also to identify possible part-ners for cooperation. In particular the databases developed within NANORUCER are useful tools serving that purpose. Secondly, a main activity within NANORUCER was the identification of possible topics for future cooperation between research groups of Russia and the EU. Within work package 6 a total of 17 core topics for future coopera-tion were identified which have been classified into the 7 fields nanometals, nanoce-ramics, carbon-based materials, nanomagnets, sensors and instruments, superconduc-tivity, and quantum-computing. These topics were presented to the research and indus-trial communities during the final workshop of NANORUCER organised on October 25th, 2011 in Brussels. 31 representatives from research organisations, industrial en-terprises and policy-making from European countries and Russia intensively discussed and finally validated the proposed topics. The validated topics for future cooperation including a roadmap indicating the time perspective for the individual topics were sum-marised and submitted in deliverable no. 13.
Additional important dissemination activities include two project workshops organ-ised in Moscow on January 13th, 2011 and April 15th, 2011. These workshops provided an opportunity to present the results of NANORUCER to key representatives of the Russian SIS in NN. In addition, opportunities for future cooperation were discussed intensively during these workshops. The final NANORUCER workshop on October 25th, 2011 in Brussels provided another forum for disseminating NANORUCER results among the scientific and industrial communities.
In addition, the NANORUER activity was presented at the following meetings:
* Information workshop "Supporting participation of Russian organisations in FP7-NMP projects", June 18th, 2010, Moscow,
* Conference "Industrial technologies 2010", September 8th, 2010, Brussels.
As an additional dissemination activity the results of the performance analysis have been published as a scientific paper in Nanotechnology Law and Business: Reiss, T. and Thielmann, A. (2010): Nanotechnology research in Russia - an analysis of scientific publications and patent applications. In: Nanotechnology Law and Business 7 (4), pp. 387-404.
Finally, the NANORUCER website was used as an important dissemination channel of results of the NANORUCER activity: www.nanorucer.eu. In addition, the NANORUCER website is linked to the Nanofutures platform (www.nanofutures.eu). In order to disseminate results of NANORUCER among the Russian communities in addition to the NANORUCER website main results are also presented on the website of the Russian partner of NANORUCER, ISS RAS: http://issras.ru/eng/
List of Websites:
www.nanorucer.eu
