Systemic Innovation

9Nanotechnologies and Business Intelligence: Challenges of Information Valorization and Knowledge Creation

9.1. Introduction

Nanotechnology has been a growing sector for several years. What is nanotechnology? Generally speaking, it is a matter of reducing our current technologies to the nanometric scale; it is a building block on the atomic scale. Nanotechnologies are technologies of the infinitely small (a magnitude of a billionth of a meter). Developed from the middle of the 20th Century onwards, they have been booming over the last 20 years. To enable these technologies to come into being, new manufacturing methods had to be created. There are two main approaches: “top-down” (reduction of an object) and “bottom-up” (construction of the nano-object atom by atom). These two techniques have enabled the development of nanotechnology in most fields.

A large number of sectors are affected by these advances. Indeed, nanotechnology is already having an impact on products such as medical devices, coatings and high-resolution cinema screens, as well as on global markets of precision engineering, electronics, biomedicine and others.

This therefore offers great potential for the future, as well as significant risks and dangers for humanity. It will therefore be a question of tracing the various innovations to the present day, and then the question will be whether nanotechnology will have a positive or negative impact in the world, and to what extent.

At this level, the question that ...