Dr Rod Hill, group executive CSIRO Manufacturing, Materials and Minerals, says that it is early days, but the aim is to use a $36.2 million Commonwealth funding package over four years, as well as CSIRO’s own resources, to make things happen for companies in the field of nanotechnology. “This means working with industry, partnering with industry, cooperating with industry,” he says.

The director of the new Niche Manufacturing Flagship, Vicki Tutungi, former chief of CSIRO’s Manufacturing and Materials Technology Division, believes the manufacturing sector is on the cusp of seeing some substantial changes, not just in Australia but globally. “Australian industry is recognising this opportunity and also recognising it needs to innovate and to invest in R&D, to succeed in this emerging field,” she says.

However, she is also quick to keep the task ahead in perspective: “There are a number of reports about the potential size of this market, and it’s often talked of in terms of trillions of dollars. But when and how we might see that sort of market evolve is unknown.”

For researchers and industries that have begun to explore nanotechnology it is a little like the discovery of electricity generation. The technology looms as something quite extraordinary, but the full breadth of its application has to be intensively researched.

For CSIRO’s part it has attracted support from the Australian Government’s Action Agenda program in which, with the involvement of industry associations, groups of companies are looking at the needs of particular industries in terms of R&D and competitiveness.

“And in the field of nanotechnology specifically, there is a lot of interest from manufacturers about what it can do for them,” Ms Tutungi says. Nanotechnology is already a big part of the success story in some high-value sectors such as medical devices. “So the announcement of the Niche Manufacturing Flagship, which focuses on harnessing the benefits that will flow from nanotechnology and delivering them to industry, is timely.”

In industry there is still some confusion about defining nanotechnology and in understanding how it can be used to deliver new products. Dr Hill offers this approach: “There are specific new applications that can take advantage of the changes in properties that occur when you change the scale of the interfaces and the particle sizes. That is the real nanotechnology: where the very small sizes lead to the convergence of different scientific disciplines at this interface of particles…a potential interface between biological and physical materials, metals and organics and so on. Where they come together you can get unique properties occurring.”

The ‘manufacturing’ component emerges when industry is able to use the new understanding of these materials to produce consumer items with enhanced properties and new functions. An example is the development of biosensors.

CSIRO is developing a hand-held biosensor that uses a combination of antibody engineering and optical sensing to detect a wide variety of biological molecules.

“Some of these projects are strategic, some are in the domain of pure research and others have commercial partners,” Ms Tutungi says. “But even at the strategic end CSIRO is always alert to commercial possibilities.”

Across industry and government there is a consensus that companies are putting a greater emphasis on R&D, but much more remains to be done. Dr Hill says the manufacturing roadmap that CSIRO put together about 18 months ago demonstrated there was considerable R&D happening in industry: “But we also concluded that not much was being invested at the new-product end; the emphasis was still on incremental product modification or in services.

“From our perspective there seemed to be a significant untapped opportunity for Australian manufacturing, because it was not tackling the new technologies that would create the new export products in the future.

“The general conclusion from a number of industry groups that we talked to was that the industry itself needed to move up the value chain – that’s their words, not ours – and think about the next generation of products that will enable Australia to develop manufacturing niches in a global economy.

“We know we can’t compete in the commodity manufacturing domain against the Indias, South Koreas and Chinas of the world.”

Some companies are heeding the message, Ms Tutungi says: “There are companies more open to and aware of what’s going on globally and are prepared to make the necessary changes.”

Dr Hill concurs. “A lot of the small and medium enterprises are looking to CSIRO to provide a lead in helping them to understand how technology can have an impact on their industry, how they can manage technology, how they can access technology not only developed in Australia but overseas, and how they can work that into their businesses and add value.

“I think CSIRO can play a role in a number of respects. First, by doing R&D in the traditional sense by developing new materials, new processes and so on that will transform industry and help us to compete internationally.

“Second, to have a translator role to help small and medium enterprises into the networks, into the channels for international innovation, which will allow them to access other people’s technology.

“And that’s a large part of the thrust of the small and medium enterprise strategy in CSIRO and it will be a key component of the Niche Manufacturing Flagship.”