Early-stage nanotech, space entrepreneurs and low-cost urban EVs
An interview with Tim Harper, a pioneer in the field of nanotech and tech-transfer.
Tim Harper is a specialist on commercializing emerging technologies and a former engineer at the European Space Agency (ESA). As a pioneering nano-scientist his work includes growing businesses in sectors ranging from IoT, sensors, energy, instrumentation, aerospace and microelectronics to advanced materials, nanotech and graphene.
After over 20 years as a serial entrepreneur and consultant working in Europe, China and the U.S., he is now launching a new low-cost electric car, the MEV BeeAnywhere, from Manchester, U.K.
Lessons from emerging technologies
Harper’s involvement in the early phases of nanotechnology taught him a few lessons about how emerging technologies work in the wild.
– As with other hyped technologies it attracted high risk investors, and many of the people who failed to make anything out of nanotech failed to make anything out of multimedia a few years earlier. In the early days of nanotech, you had to claim that it would be a trillion-dollar market to get the funding, and most of the initial hype came from academics trying to get research funding. The scientists themselves didn’t believe the hype, but the investors often did. I observed how the smart investors got in and out while a sector was hot, and left pieces for the amateurs to pick up.
Harper points out that nanomaterials are the bottom of the value-chain, and it’s easier to make money by putting a product on a shelf, than producing the materials going into it.
– If you can find an application that can only be enabled by nanotech, you might have a market. But many early players in nanotech forgot about quality, the most important thing for your customers. If you cannot supply the same material this week, next week, next year and next decade, and whether a gram or a ton, then there won’t be a market.
– It also important to remember that just because something is new, or labeled nano, doesn't necessarily make it better. Unless there is a compelling commercial reason for someone to switch from something they know and understand, like carbon fiber, to something new, like nanotubes or graphene, then they won't.
Today, Harper is wary of calling anything nanotech.
– Nanotech has fundamentally been a term for being able to manipulate matter at the scale of a few atoms, and in that sense had a huge impact on industries that work at that scale, like the semiconductor industry or in biotechnology. A lot of the early nanotech theorists sat at their computers and designed little machines made out of atoms, a kind of nanotech steampunk, but as all of nature works on the nanoscale, imposing our macroscale worldview was never going to work.
– One of the most productive strategies has been to use our understanding of the nanoscale to probe natural processes, understand, replicate and then manipulate them. This was a hard lesson for the early nanotech community like the Foresight Institute, but there’s no escape from doing the science, the hard stuff, before you can do the fun stuff.
Tech-transfer and missed opportunities
Harper believe that the market for nanotech is gradually coming to maturity, but that many applications still lack incentives for their full development.
– In the long run the real work is invisible and looking for a trigger to bring it in to the spotlight. If you look at most COVID-19 vaccines today they are in essence nanomedicine, but without a pandemic there would have been less incentives to develop them. The same could be said about other costly, but highly beneficial applications of nanotech.
He is skeptical of governments who adopt “a build it and they will come”-attitude and points to how the graphene “field of dreams” kept researchers funded for a decade, but question if it ever will justify the billion Euro investment.
– Graphene was the nanotech trillion-dollar market all over again, but this time based on a single material, not a whole new area of science. While nanotech now touches every area of our lives, graphene is still looking for its killer application. I suspect that it will end up a niche curiosity, like carbon nanotubes, with a few specialized applications, unless anyone can figure out how to make it cheap enough to be dumped into composites and concreate in bulk.
– Unfortunately, most academics don’t know how to commercialize technology. For every world class tech-transfer team at MIT, Oxford or a similar prestigious university, there are a thousand clueless buffoons who wouldn't recognize an opportunity if it punched them in the face and stuffed hundred-dollar bills in their pockets, he says and adds:
– Why some universities still run tech-transfer departments at a huge loss is a source of eternal mystery.
Designer materials
Despite the lack of a nanotech-killer-app, Harper is optimistic about the future of technologies operating with molecular precision.
– As we become more skilled at manipulating matter, coupled with A.I. applied to computational chemistry and protein folding, we are getting towards materials by design. That means that instead of having to work with what we have and forcing materials to do something that they don’t naturally do, we will be able to take a more application-driven approach. The question will cease to be "what have we got to work with?" and become "what performance do we need for this application”?
– In comparison, doping silicon to process information will look as quaint as copying books by hand using a quill pen.
Risk aversion
As a former engineer at the ESA, Harper has seen the inside of the space industry and how private capital (read Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) has revolutionized the industry.
– The infusion of private capital in the space industry is the best things that could have happened. The space industry is risk averse by nature, and largely funded by governments who - apart from the Chinese - are more motivated by avoiding failure than achievement. It’s rare for anything creative to happen in a bureaucratic system, due to the fact that there are too many people who say “no” or "what if it goes wrong?".
– I remember a meeting at ESA on generating income from the International Space Station that resulted in two equally unpalatable options; paint the outside of the space station with a sponsored logo or make space pornography. The obvious conclusion, to a bunch of career bureaucrats who had never commercialized anything in their lives, was that space could not be commercialized and that there was no point in making any further effort. Thankfully, they don’t run the entire industry anymore, but it’s taken thirty years to shove them out of the way.
Harper emphasized that despite these challenges, the privatization of space has resulted in a dramatic drop in launch cost.
– Thanks to private space entrepreneurs who have reduced launch cost, government sector has freed up resource to concentrate on scientific missions, and of course the military aspects of space. The lesson learned from this transition is that bureaucrats don't get any bonus for cutting costs, so they won’t.
Launching an affordable EV for the masses
His current venture, the MEV BeeAnywhere, started when he was working with Dr. Tony Keating, a friend from Keating Supercars and founder of the National Centre for Motorsport Engineering (NCME).
– It all started with me asking Tony why EVs are so expensive. With my background is aerospace and his from motorsport we wondered if we could apply the same engineering techniques to reduce the cost of producing EVs. After studying the market for EVs, we realized that the only way to go was to start with a blank piece of paper and design a vehicle from the ground up. And as we already had a team that designed supercars, we had access to that expertise.
– Initially I had three objectives; primarily it had to be cheap, competing with high end electric bikes, rather than a Tesla. Secondly it had to be recyclable, making the best use of materials and engineering techniques. Finally, it had to be the sort of car I’d be happy to drive myself, and I’m quite demanding in that department.
MEV announced the two-seat two-door small hatchback with graphene-based body panels in March 2020. Pre-production prototypes are being built in collaboration with the NCME at the University of Bolton and the University of Manchester’s Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre.
– Rather than announcing it and failing to build it, we decided to build the prototype first to demonstrate that we could do it for the price. Thanks to a great team we’ll be launching the car this year at under £ 10,000.
What other emerging technologies are you looking forward to in the near future?
– There is great potential in the convergence of edge computing, sensors and IoT, but I suspect that the real breakthroughs will be in the biosciences. The rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine has shown what can be done, and I believe that we will see similar efforts to address the problem of antibiotic resistance and other urgent issues.
– Biological computing has also been a dream for a long time, and since it essentially is a mash up of nanotech and biology, maybe we’ll start seeing some tangible progress there. After all, it’s way more energy efficient than the computing power we currently have.
Hydrogen economy and neuromorphic architecture
Harper also believe the shift to a hydrogen economy will happen faster than most people think.
– Despite the entrenched lobbies for fossil fuel and batteries, hydrogen will win as a far greener technology. Going forward more questions will be asked about the sustainability of batteries for EVs, and for a lot of industries green hydrogen is the only alternative to fossil fuels.
– From a totally different perspective I think we will see more neuromorphic and biomimetic architectures as we reach the limits of von Neumann architectures. The future has never been more diverse and inspiring, Harper concludes.
Follow Tim Harper on Twitter.