Nanotechnology – Markets & Trends. Nanotechnologie – Märkte und Trends

The world of nanotechnology is gaining more and more interest from the scientific point of view as well as for industrial applications. Promising product and process innovations that are based on nanotechnology have stimulated the involvement of industry and the financial community. Rather than an evolutionary oriented top‐down approach pushing critical dimensions from microns down into the nanometre range, the real potential of nanotechnology lies in the creation of novel functional structures of superior performance by controlling structures on a scale between 1 and 100 nanometres with completely changed properties. Making use of these novel properties of known materials is highly attractive for applications in a variety of fields, underlining that nanotechnology is regarded as key technology of the 21st century a promising product and process innovations that are based on nanotechnology have stimulated the involvement of scientific community and the industry, because nanotechnology is not only scientific artwork but is currently used in a considerable number of products in a multibillion‐dollar marketplace.