Battelle-R&D Magazine Annual Global Funding Forecast Predicts R&D Spending Growth Will Continue While Globalization Accelerates

The Battelle-R&D Magazine annual Global R&D Funding Forecast shows global research and development (R&D) spending is expected to grow by about 5.2 percent in 2012 to more than $1.4 trillion.

One of the most remarkable findings of the report is that R&D funding growth will largely be driven by Asian economies-a number projected to increase by nearly 9 percent in 2012. Elsewhere in the world, growth remains strong and stable in the aftermath of the global recession. Greece is the only country among the world's top 40 R&D spenders that is not expected to increase its R&D budget during the next year. The closely watched study also predicts that overall European R&D will grow by about 3.5 percent while North American R&D will grow by 2.8 percent.  

Experts from Battelle and R&D Magazine forecast that a 2.1 percent growth in United States R&D expenditures will be balanced against an estimated 2 percent inflation rate, suggesting that U.S. R&D investments will remain flat in real terms over the next year. That $436 billion in forecasted spending is expected to be broken down in the following way:

U.S. Private Industry will spend by far the largest amount with a projection of $279.6 billion in R&D in 2012, up 3.75 percent over 2011.U.S. Federal Government spending will reach $125.6 billion in 2012, a decrease of 1.16 percent.Academia in the U.S. will spend $12 billion on research in 2012, up 2.85 percent over last year.Non-profits will increase spending in 2012 by 2.7 percent to $14.5 billion and other government entities in the U.S. will round out total R&D expenditures by increasing 2.72 percent to $3.8 billion.

Another notable trend the Funding Forecast reveals is the increased expectation that R&D investments will provide financial returns and positive commercial outcomes. Several years ago, only 10 percent of U.S. industries calculated return on investment (ROI) from R&D efforts, while data from a survey that is part of the Funding Forecast now indicates that 40 percent measure that figure.

"The pharmaceutical industry illustrates this trend best as it faces increased scrutiny of R&D spending versus limited productivity and weak pipelines for blockbuster drugs," said Martin Grueber, Battelle Research Leader and co-author of the report. "However, industry isn't the only sector under the ROI microscope. There also are increasing demands that public sector R&D investments show real economic and policy outcomes."

With 18 U.S. corporations among the top 50 firms ranked by R&D spending, the U.S. remains dominant in manufacturing R&D. However, translating this level of R&D and innovation into output, products and jobs is a challenge faced by both U.S. corporations and government. There is wide agreement that technology collaborations are important to growth with many manufacturers planning on increasing collaborative activity such as knowledge sharing, shorter development cycles and the availability of proprietary technologies.

Survey respondents identified the top three ways government could help support manufacturing R&D as: providing tax credits to companies with active R&D programs, supporting academic R&D in manufacturing and increasing tech transfer support from U.S. national labs to industry.

Energy: Energy-related research sponsored by U.S. manufacturers and technology providers will reach nearly $6.7 billion in 2012, up 23.1 percent from 2011. Global spending by energy-related companies will grow by 7.8 percent to reach $17.9 billion in 2012.

A review panel commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) identified key R&D areas where DOE program and investment can play a significant development role, including several in which the DOE historically has underinvested. The areas address both energy supply and demand and relate to both stationary power (deploying clean electricity, modernizing the grid and increasing building/industrial efficiency) and transport power (deploying alternative hydrocarbon fuels, electrifying the vehicle fleet, and increasing vehicle efficiency.)

The panel calls on DOE to maintain a mix of analytic, assessment and fundamental engineering research capabilities in a broad set of energy-technology areas while seeking to balance more assured activities against higher-risk transformational work. At the same time, the report acknowledges that the efforts must be relevant to the private sector. There is a tension between supporting work that industry doesn't-the long term nature of basic research-and the urgency of the nation's energy challenge.

Life Science: United States R&D spending in the life science industry is expected to decline by 5.7 percent to $73.2 billion in 2012 as pharmaceutical firms tighten their R&D budgets. Global R&D spending in the industry also is forecast to decline by 2.2 percent to $147.3 billion.

This sector includes such diverse firms as multi-national pharmaceutical corporations, large medical device and instrument companies and both large and small biotechnology firms.

A major change in the funding and performing of life science R&D is the convergence in public and private sector R&D toward open innovation and open source information-especially in areas needing considerable fundamental research. It is due, in part, to the pharmaceutical industry's retrenchment from its conventional model to a more reduced internal R&D function and focuses more on collaboration and ROI. The ripple effects of impending patent expirations and the widely reported decline in productivity in the development and approval of significant new medicines are driving the strategic changes.

Chemicals and Materials: R&D in the broadly defined chemicals and materials industry is expected to grow by 11.4 percent in the U.S. to $9.3 billion in 2012, while growing by 3.8 percent globally to $33.8 billion.

Nanotechnology and its applications continue to pervade all industrial applications with biomedical applications beginning during the past two years. More than 15 U.S. government agencies propose funding $2.13 billion in nanotechnology research including DOE at $611 million, the National Institutes of Health at $465 million, the National Science Foundation at $456 million and the Department of Defense at $368 million.

An emerging priority in advanced materials is a heightened focus on developing alternative sources or processes related to rare earth metals because of China's recent export limits on supplies. In the industrial sector around the world, closed non-Chinese rare earth mines are being re-opened; however, the environmental requirements for operating these mines have increased since they closed, making additional R&D and capital expenditures necessary to develop new and improved processing programs.

While you're up, print me a solar cell

The sheet of paper looks like any other document that might have just come spitting out of an office printer, with an array of colored rectangles printed over much of its surface. But then a researcher picks it up, clips a couple of wires to one end, and shines a light on the paper. Instantly an LCD clock display at the other end of the wires starts to display the time.

Almost as cheaply and easily as printing a photo on your inkjet, an inexpensive, simple solar cell has been created on that flimsy sheet, formed from special “inks” deposited on the paper. You can even fold it up to slip into a pocket, then unfold it and watch it generating electricity again in the sunlight.

The new technology, developed by a team of researchers at MIT, is reported in a paper in the journal Advanced Materials, published online July 8. The paper is co-authored by Karen Gleason, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser Professor of Chemical Engineering; Professor of Electrical Engineering Vladimir Bulović; graduate student Miles Barr; and six other students and postdocs. The work was supported by the Eni-MIT Alliance Solar Frontiers Program and the National Science Foundation.

The technique represents a major departure from the systems used until now to create most solar cells, which require exposing the substrates to potentially damaging conditions, either in the form of liquids or high temperatures. The new printing process uses vapors, not liquids, and temperatures less than 120 degrees Celsius. These “gentle” conditions make it possible to use ordinary untreated paper, cloth or plastic as the substrate on which the solar cells can be printed.

It is, to be sure, a bit more complex than just printing out a term paper. In order to create an array of photovoltaic cells on the paper, five layers of material need to be deposited onto the same sheet of paper in successive passes, using a mask (also made of paper) to form the patterns of cells on the surface. And the process has to take place in a vacuum chamber.

Barr places a sheet of paper with a mask on it into the vapor-printing chamber.Photo: Patrick Gillooly

The basic process is essentially the same as the one used to make the silvery lining in your bag of potato chips: a vapor-deposition process that can be carried out inexpensively on a vast commercial scale.

The resilient solar cells still function even when folded up into a paper airplane. In their paper, the MIT researchers also describe printing a solar cell on a sheet of PET plastic (a thinner version of the material used for soda bottles) and then folding and unfolding it 1,000 times, with no significant loss of performance. By contrast, a commercially produced solar cell on the same material failed after a single folding.

“We have demonstrated quite thoroughly the robustness of this technology,” Bulović says. In addition, because of the low weight of the paper or plastic substrate compared to conventional glass or other materials, “we think we can fabricate scalable solar cells that can reach record-high watts-per-kilogram performance. For solar cells with such properties, a number of technological applications open up,” he says. For example, in remote developing-world locations, weight makes a big difference in how many cells could be delivered in a given load.

Gleason adds, “Often people talk about deposition on a flexible device — but then they don’t flex it, to actually demonstrate” that it can survive the stress. In this case, in addition to the folding tests, the MIT team tried other tests of the device’s robustness. For example, she says, they took a finished paper solar cell and ran it through a laser printer — printing on top of the photovoltaic surface, subjecting it to the high temperature of the toner-fusing step — and demonstrated that it still worked. Test cells the group produced last year still work, demonstrating their long shelf life.

Barr holds a sheet of paper that has had one of the layers of the solar cell printed on its surface. Photo: Patrick Gillooly

In today’s conventional solar cells, the costs of the inactive components — the substrate (usually glass) that supports the active photovoltaic material, the structures to support that substrate, and the installation costs — are typically greater than the cost of the active films of the cells themselves, sometimes twice as much. Being able to print solar cells directly onto inexpensive, easily available materials such as paper or cloth, and then easily fasten that paper to a wall for support, could ultimately make it possible to drastically reduce the costs of solar installations. For example, paper solar cells could be made into window shades or wallpaper — and paper costs one-thousandth as much as glass for a given area, the researchers say.

For outdoor uses, the researchers demonstrated that the paper could be coated with standard lamination materials, to protect it from the elements.

Others have tried to produce solar cells and other electronic components on paper, but the big stumbling block has been paper’s rough, fibrous surface at a microscopic scale. To counter that, past attempts have relied on coating the paper first with some smooth material. But in this research, ordinary, uncoated paper was used — including printer paper, tissue, tracing paper and even newsprint with the printing still on it. All of these worked just fine.

The researchers continue to work on improving the devices. At present, the paper-printed solar cells have an efficiency of about 1 percent, but the team believes this can be increased significantly with further fine-tuning of the materials. But even at the present level, “it’s good enough to power a small electric gizmo,” Bulović says.

Enlarge

A paper solar cell that has been repeatedly folded is illuminated from below and connected to a voltmeter to demonstrate its output (26 V). Image courtesy of the Gleason Lab

“I am very excited by what is being done” by the MIT team, says Peter Harrop, chairman of IDTechEx, which does research on printed electronics. He says that while most researchers have been focusing on large-scale solar installations that could feed into the electric grid, the potential for other applications “is at least as large. Here the key parameters are very different, with disposable consumer goods, wall coverings and other applications with limited life required.”

He adds, “The work at MIT ... is therefore very important. To succeed it must promise low enough cost and low enough sensitivity to humidity.” Other attempts to create printable solar cells have been criticized for failing to meet these criteria, he notes.
This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news : web)