ABSTRACT
Like biotech ventures, nanotech and advanced materials ventures face high technological and market uncertainty over long time frames [3, 18, 26]. Nanotechnology, like advanced materials, also comprises a set of technologically diverse enabling technologies based on process innovation [17, 25, 28]. However, unlike biotech, nanotech ventures have to choose between a vast range of unrelated markets with entirely different alliance partners, regulatory systems, and performance attributes [29]. Nanotech ventures also have different marketing uncertainty challenges, without the step function reduction in uncertainty provided by clinical trials, or the same likelihood that, having resolved technological uncertainty and passed regulatory hurdles, the product will be adopted.
