I’m back at my desk now, and here’s my quick summary.

We heard presentations from ten Minnesota companies (and one from Canada) about how they’re currently using nanotechnology and how they might use it in the future. The uses were all pretty varied. Some companies are using nanotechnology to develop cheap, disposable diagnostics tools (Diagnostic Biosensors, Douglas Scientific). Others are using nanotech to make tools last longer by coating them with thin, near indestructible layers of particles (Phygen).

Darrel Untereker, vice president of technology for Medtronic, started off the morning by explaining what nanotechnology is, and how it can be difficult to comprehend. “It’s everything, and yet it’s nothing.” In short, it’s any technology that centers around manipulating materials at a spectacularly small scale — a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Scientists have discovered that materials behave different when isolated at that scale. The Periodic Table? Forget it, said Emil Hallin, director of strategic scientific development at Canadian Light Source. At the nano scale, materials may have entirely different properties.

A few of the presentations were too technical my novice brain to keep up with, but several were quite accessible. Here’s a few very small summaries of some of the presentations:

• Douglas Scientific, a company based in Alexandria, is developing a tool aimed at cutting the cost and time it takes to analyze biofluids. Currently, much of that work is done using micro test plates, a compact tray that can hold dozens of liquid samples. Douglas Scientific’s product compacts that even further by sealing nanoliter samples inside a thin plastic tape, which can be fed through a machine and scanned for data.
• RJA Dispersions is a Maplewood company led by two former 3M employees. It produces nano-particle and pigment dispersions that are used to make ink jet ink. The particles need to be small enough that they won’t clog the ink jet nozzles and stable enough so that they won’t coagulate inside the cartridges.
• And Kevin Kluggtvedt summarized efforts by the Rushford Institute for NanoTechnology to make the southern Minnesota town a hub for nanotechnology (Little Particles on the Prairie?). Companies include Rushford Hypersonic and Kluggtvedt’s company, Rushford NanoElectro Chemical Co.

Were you there, too? What did you take away? Feel free to share in the comments section.

Fry should know. Local mythology notwithstanding, he was the one who actually invented 3M’s avatar of handiness, the “yellow stickies” ubiquitous in offices the world over.

Instead, Fry told a session on innovation last week at the University of Minnesota, Post-its were a natural outgrowth of the corporate culture at 3M — a culture that specifically encouraged the development of such innovations.

“If you save your money for a trip, and you go someplace that you’ve never been before, and you see new things that you didn’t know existed, it’s not an accident,” Fry said.

Today, innovation is the buzz word du jour in business circles, with companies in nearly every industry asking themselves how they can achieve the quality. Fry offered his insights last week to a group of medical technology professionals about what made 3M innovative in the mid-1970s. (Continue reading…)