1. 44
By Mark Shortt
Helping some of the world’s best known companies create
products that generate outsize impacts in their respective fields,
or even beyond, isn’t bad work if you can get it. That’s exactly
what the scientists and engineers at Nano Terra, a small product
development company in Cambridge, Mass., do when they go
about their daily business.
Nano Terra describes itself as an innovation accelerator, one
that contributes expertise in fields like surface science, print-
ing and patterning, and advanced materials to help companies
develop and commercialize transformational products. The
company began in 2006, licensing a large technology portfolio
from the George Whitesides laboratory at Harvard University.
Today, it employs about 30 at its own lab in Cambridge, where
its scientists and engineers work on ambitious co-development
programs with some of the world’s biggest players in the aero-
space, automotive, oil and gas, electronics, and consumer goods
industries, among many others. Nano Terra says that it has
worked on commercial co-development programs with more
than 30 companies, including 3M, Boeing, Honeywell, Merck
KGaA, Infineum, Ahlstrom, and Pentair.
Nano Terra Managing Director Brian Mayers, who had pre-
viously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard in the labs
of Nano Terra co-founder, Professor George Whitesides, was
the first scientist in the door when Nano Terra started nearly
ten years ago.
“We develop new and innovative products, largely through
co- development with our commercial partners,” said Mayers
in a recent phone interview. “We are built as a co-development
company, to bring new technologies from proof-of-concept to
prototype to product. We’re very technologically deep, with
world-class expertise in advanced materials, surface science, and
in materials from the macro scale down to the molecular scale,
and we apply that expertise to do product-focused innovation.
“We leverage the capabilities that we have in house, and
we pull in technologies as needed from university or corporate
partners,” Mayers continued. “But what really differentiates
us is our ability to take those technologies and put them into
real prototypes and into real products. It’s technology that is
applied. We’re very much a heavy technology company, but
where the rubber meets the road, we can actually create proto-
types and products that lead to things that you can make in a
manufacturing-relevant way.”
In addition to advanced materials and surface science, Nano
Terra’s strengths include printing and patterning; chemistry and
polymers; engineering and modeling, and rapid prototyping.
Nano Terra has worked on a broad range of new technologies,
including designing new classes of molecules; formulating
advanced polymers, gels and adhesives; creating encapsulated
and coated particles, both nanoscale and microscale; developing
advanced sensor concepts; printing and patterning at high reso-
lutions onto flat, flexible, and curved substrates; and designing
and engineering new product concepts.
“Our capabilities either enhance existing or create entirely
new products in a broad range of areas,” the company states
on its website (www.nanoterra.com). These areas are reported
to include smart materials and surfaces; flexible electronics,
such as displays and electronic packaging; energy, including
fuel cells, batteries, and solar power; sensors; consumer goods;
and industrial products and processes.
Nano Terra received a 2014 Boeing Performance Excellence
Award from The Boeing Company, in recognition of superior
performance and having maintained a Silver composite per-
formance rating for each month of the 12-month performance
period, from Oct. 1, 2013, to Sept. 30, 2014.
“We’ve been working with Boeing for at least as long as
I’ve been here—six years—on a variety of programs, and we
consider Boeing to be a very good partner, a great company to
work with,” Nano Terra Vice President of Business Development
Mike Fuerstman told D2P in an interview. “We were very proud
to get that kind of award because it gives another point of valida-
tion for the partnership model that Nano Terra was built on.”
Mike Fuerstman joined Brian Mayers recently in speaking
with D2P about the company’s work in co-developing innovative
products. Following are edited excerpts of our conversation.
D2P: How is Nano Terra able to help accelerate the innova-
tion process?
Brian Mayers: There are three key ways. First, we are flexible,
nimble, and we work very quickly. So for a lot of the companies
we work with, particularly the larger companies, where it may
take them a month to get a chemical in the door, in terms of
checking off all the boxes required, we can produce samples,
create a prototype, and get the thing back to them in the same
time it takes them to get that chemical in the building. So we
work quickly.
The second is that we’re able to leverage the work we do
across a number of industries to help get to an answer more
quickly, or bring in a new set of technologies that they may not
have seen, or may not have access to.
COLLABORATION
Product Development for
the Big, Bold, and Ambitious
Got any ideas for innovations that could unlock a potentially huge and lucrative market? A small company in
Massachusetts works with major players to bring transformative products to the commercial marketplace.

3. 46 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • November 2015
And then the third way is that we really align our objectives
with creating products for our customers. And our business
model incentivizes us to complete the projects quickly and get
those products to market. We’ve actually brought products to
market from blackboard to delivery in less than 18 months.
D2P: You work with companies on developing what are called
transformational products. What are companies typically try-
ing to accomplish with that type of product?
Mike Fuerstman: Generally, when we engage with a potential
partner, we try to get them to think about the kinds of innova-
tions that can really move the needle for their business in a
significant way. Oftentimes, while many companies try to look
towards that kind of objective, the bulk of their R&D efforts are
focused on the sort of everyday blocking and tackling that they
have to do in order to meet their customers’ immediate-term
needs. Those efforts are not really transformational, though;
they’re continuing the business along the same path. Companies
certainly do need to put resources towards addressing their
customers’ immediate-term needs, but they can lose sight of
what’s happening two steps down the road. So we talk with our
partners about what can be done to really provide a transfor-
mational innovation and create a new product line that enables
significant new revenue streams, and how Nano Terra can play
a role in developing those technologies with those companies.
D2P: The process of integrating lab-developed technologies
into new products can be very challenging. What gave Nano
Terra’s founding team reason to believe that its technology
expertise could be successfully applied to product development
in the commercial realm?
Brian Mayers: For one, we had a phenomenal founding team,
led by Harvard University Professor, George Whitesides, who’s
not only successful in his academic career, but has also founded
a number of companies that have been very successful in the
market—including Genzyme, Theravance, Geltex, and others—
with a market cap over $20 billion. He and our other found-
ers brought significant expertise in technology and business
development that enabled us to have confidence that we could
leverage our capabilities to put together a successful company.
D2P: If you were to summarize some specific benefits a
manufacturer might get through collaboration, such as rapid
product development or innovation, what would you say?
Brian Mayers: In the simplest form, it’s seeing beyond the next
quarter, beyond just supporting existing products. Often, it
takes hiring an outsider to do that, so a company can go after
some of the bigger fish, but not lose what’s currently in the pan.
Working with a company like Nano Terra that solves problems
across a range of industries allows our partners to exploit tech-
nologies from other industries that they may not have otherwise
known about.
Mike Fuerstman: There’s a bit of pattern recognition that helps
Nano Terra to solve other companies’ challenges in a more suc-
cessful way. Nano Terra’s partner list is extremely diverse. We’ve
worked with companies in the aerospace business, to consumer
goods, water treatment, animal care products, chemicals, food,
analytical devices.
Brian Mayers: And that’s just the work we do with commercial
partners. About a third of our business is with the U.S. Govern-
ment. We have programs with the DoE, DoD, NIH, so we can
apply those technologies to cross-pollinate into our work in
creating products for our commercial customers.

4. 47November 2015 • www.d2pmagazine.com
Mike Fuerstman: From what I’ve seen,
if you’re a company that’s focusing on a
specific set of industries, or even if you’re
a bigger conglomerate that’s all over
the map, often times, you still don’t see
the connections between some of those
industries and some of the technologies
that are used to solve challenges in differ-
ent industries. So, the fact that we’ve seen
quite a bit—and quite broadly—enables
us, in many cases, to say, “Oh, I think we
have something here,” or “We’ve seen
this or we’ve tried that, and that could
slide in here, and won’t solve the prob-
lem directly, but will get us quite far down
the path and enable us to come up with
some really great ideas.”
Ideally, conglomerates should be able
to leverage their technologies across busi-
ness units. I was having lunch with a VP
level guy we worked with at one of our
partners. He’s at a large conglomerate, a
company with many different operating
units. And he was, for a long time, in
one particular division that focused on
one industry. And then he got moved
over to lead a very different business unit
with very different customer sets and very
different technical challenges. They were
trying to tackle a particularly problematic
engineering challenge, and he said, “I’ve
seen this before. We have a technology
that we developed on the other side of
the business that could be really useful
here,” and he was able to bring it over.
The problem is that those kinds
of things don’t happen all the time in
these large companies, and usually only
when people move from one business
to another. So Nano Terra can help to
bring some of those technical solutions
across industries. And for some of our
smaller-sized customers, Nano Terra is
often one of the only viable ways they
have of getting that kind of broad view.
And then there’s a third benefit to
our partners—this idea of flexible ac-
cess to our expertise. We have a team of
experts in several functional areas that
many of the partners we work with either
don’t have in house, or have deployed
already against near-term technology
development needs. And so bringing
in and staffing up this expertise is not
really feasible, certainly not on a rapid
time scale.
D2P: You mentioned the ability to
problem solve across industries by taking
technologies from one industry and ap-
plying them to another. Does this make
for a lot of unanticipated solutions?
Brian Mayers: Without a doubt.
Mike Fuerstman: Yes, it’s a really fun
thing to see, actually. Since I head up
business development, I don’t manage
any of the science programs directly, but
I check in to see how things are going.
It’s always amazing, the ebb and flow of
innovation and the surprising things that
come out of it.
D2P: Can you explain the process of
how Nano Terra engages with a custom-
er, and what this collaborative process
actually entails as you go forward?
Mike Fuerstman: There’s never one way
that the process goes every time, but we
do, generally, have a way of approaching
it. When we talk with a company about
who we are, we talk a little bit about the
background of the company and our
expertise to give them a frame of refer-
ence, but we almost always start the con-
versation with the question “What kind
of innovation would create value for your
company, in your industry?”
We try not to focus on the specific
technologies that we currently have. We
think about the expertise that we have,

5. 48 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • November 2015
but we want to focus on the product. What kind of product will
create value, and then how do we develop it?
And so we sit with our partners and come up with a list of
potential opportunities for new products or new features for
existing products. These ideas can come from many different
places. We do some brainstorming here, especially if it’s an
industry that we’re familiar with. Or if the potential partner
makes products that we’re consumers of, we’ll sit around and
have a discussion around what kinds of innovations would we
love to see be developed. And our partners will also have quite
a bit of market intelligence work that they’ve done to come up
with a list of things that are interesting as well.
We also have brainstorming discussions between teams at
Nano Terra and our partner, typically under confidentiality
agreements. And then we generate a big list of opportunities,
with anywhere from a few items to dozens. We then try to dive
deeper into those items from a technical standpoint, and also
from a value standpoint. So we challenge the partners to say,
really, how can this create value for you? Is this something
that’s going to reduce the cost of goods by a half a percent, or
a tenth of a percent, and it’s not really a huge opportunity, or
is it something that’s going to open up a new hundred million
dollar ($100 million) market for you?
Once we look at that from a value standpoint, we look at it
from a technical fit standpoint. Do we have the skills to do it?
Do we have some compelling ideas that we’d like to try that we
think are worth going at? We also think about technical risk, so
we’re prioritizing these challenges or opportunities based on
potential value, technical fit, technical risk, and we also think
about what kind of resources would be required to address
those opportunities.
And once we’ve got this list prioritized, we can figure out with
our partners which projects make the most sense to work on.
Many of the companies we talk to have no shortage of creative
ideas if they look in the right places, and then it’s just a matter
of lining them up in a way that really unlocks what the valuable
innovations would be.
D2P: Are Nano Terra’s capabilities more relevant to any par-
ticular product categories, or do they have broad application
across industries?
Brian Mayers: It’s pretty broad. Most industries can benefit
from advanced materials or surface engineering. As Mike said,
we’ve worked with leading players in a number of industries—
aerospace, automotive, medical devices, consumer goods,
agriculture, chemicals, oil and gas, packaging, food, electronic
materials, and so forth. And add to that the list of things we’ve
done in our government work, with entities like the NIH, DoE,
and DoD, and you get a sense for the really broad spectrum of
areas that we’re involved in.
It’s hard to be everything to everyone, but if you pull it back to
what our core capabilities are, and this idea of materials science,
surface engineering, and patterning, it’s actually surprising how
applicable that is to many of these companies that create things.
Anyone who’s in the business of creating a product is using a
material, and that material has an interface with the world, which
is its surface. And so the tools that we have, and the expertise
that we have, some of which we’ve pulled from Harvard, from
the Whitesides Lab, some of which we’ve developed ourselves,
really allow us to control those materials and their surfaces, and
get to groundbreaking new products.