NanoInnovation: What Every Manager Needs to Know

Dedication

This book is dedicated to

Fred Kavli (1927–2013)

Founder and Chairman, The Kavli Foundation

This book is dedicated to the late Fred Kavli. I was privileged to meet Fred in 2011 at the Wharton School when he was being presented with the Franklin Institute's Bower Award for Business Leadership. He provided the following quotation for this book, although sadly he did not live to see it published:

“We cannot predict the future and foresee all the revolutionary developments that nanotechnology will bring us, but it gives us confidence that our rate of development and discovery will follow the logarithmic curve and maintain an ever-increasing rate of expansion and discovery to bring us a future that is so revolutionary that we cannot even imagine it today anymore that we could imagine the revolution that the transistor would bring when it was discovered in the 1940's.”

Figure 1 Fred Kavli and Michael Tomczyk.

Fred was a Norwegian (and naturalized American) entrepreneur, inventor, and philanthropist who used his wealth to fund the Kavli Foundation, Kavli Prize, and Kavli Institutes, including the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology at Harvard University. As you can see from this photo, the octogenarian retained his enthusiasm throughout his life and is a wonderful example of a world-class innovation champion.