Nanotech Is Living Large

Pharmaceutical companies are the worst laggards. "Large drugmakers are coming to the nanotech game very late," Bunger wrote. "These players believe they can simply acquire early-stage products after they enter clinical trials. By waiting until promising nano-enabled products mature, life-science giants deprive patients of needed drugs -- and shareholders of the profits that flow from them."

Bunger warns that, as nanotechnology develops into a more mature and more commonplace part of the marketplace, it will precipitate the kind of structural changes to industries that digital technology brought to film. Companies slow to adapt, as Eastman Kodak was to digital cameras, will be left mired in endless restructuring.

In other words, an oil company that is today looking for a partner in the chemical industry to develop nanostructured solar cells will have an edge over less farsighted competitors. Bunger singled out Boeing as a company preparing on several fronts, not only by developing nanotechnology in house but also by building a chain of nanotech suppliers and partnering with research facilities at Northwestern University.

For investors, all of this means that nanotechnology will not turn many large companies into a pure play driven by their nano-innovations. Instead, it will give some companies a big chance to strengthen their hold in an industry and force others to fall by the wayside.

The time to start watching how companies are investing in and deploying nanotech won't come in some distant future. If Lux is right, that time is now. As Bunger put it: "The next four years form a short window of time for large corporations to reorganize."