How has the relationship between business and science changed over the last sixty years and what business opportunities might science deliver in the future?

The rise of technology coincides with the history of Director. It is pure coincidence that record floods in the UK marked both the birth of Director and its 60th anniversary year.

Back in 1947 there was no talk of climate change. In 2007, though, all the talk is of climate change, a phenomenon that, no matter how much you believe in it, is a massive business opportunity and one that will depend on exploiting some neat science and technology.

Innovative companies can develop products and services that reduce our contribution to global warming. There are also opportunities for ideas that allow us to survive the extremes and unpredictability that many expect to result from all that CO2, much of which has entered the atmosphere since Director first appeared.

The spectre of climate change is just one of many changes in the scientific backdrop to modern business that we have seen. During the last 60 years, nuclear power has come, and perhaps gone, as have thermionic valves. (Note to younger readers, these were "bottles" of glowing electronic wires that brought us our first radios and TVs before transistors and integrated circuits came along.) These two technologies are themselves children of that great driver of scientific progress, World War II.

There were less visible outcomes from war-time science whose results persist to this day, for example, in how businesses function. The year 1947 also saw the publication of an interesting government publication Science at War (1947, HMSO, 2s. 6d., or 12.5p in today's currency) which claims: "The development of operational research was one of the chief scientific features of the war".

OR, as it was known, started out as a way of planning how best to use equipment, such as radar, in the pursuit of war. It brought scientific thinking to decision making in the management and use of people and equipment. When the war was over, and there was less need to work out how best to run convoys, OR became a general business tool.

Back when OR was impinging on the thinking of Director's early readers, boffins, as scientists became known during the war, really were the name of the game in corporate science. If there is one major change in the relationship between business and science it is in their relative roles.

After the war, businesses realised that they needed their own boffins. So companies filled country houses with scientists and expensive kit in the hope that someone would occasionally scream Eureka! and emerge with something the real engineers could turn into products that the marketers could then sell. It doesn't work like that any more, perhaps to the regret of the men (for that is what they were) in white coats.

Scientists now have to talk to customers and to know what is going on in the market. In theory at least, managers should also have a closer understanding of what remains of the corporate R&D operation.

One of the more visible signs of the closer relationship between business and science is in the attitude of those researchers who stay off the corporate payrolls and opt for an academic life. They may still spend most of their time in the university lab, but many university scientists passionately believe that they are the best people to pick up their own ideas and bring them to the market.

Once regarded with some disdain, being a director of a company that is commercialising your research is almost de rigueur in some sectors of academe. Governments even judge the productivity of R&D investments in terms of the number of university spin-outs, even though this is a crude measure of the effectiveness of knowledge transfer from lab to market.
Where will those ideas come from over the next 60 years? Apart from the fact that it is even harder to predict where science will go than it is to forecast the oscillations of the world's stockmarkets, there are some general pointers.

There is often fertile territory at the boundaries between scientific disciplines. In particular, there is a lot happening in the subject of cognitive science-understanding how the brain works. Put that together with information and communications technologies (ICT) and the possibilities are endless.

Throw in the broader biosciences, molecular biology, stem cells and genetics, and a dash of nanotechnology, and the possibilities are mind boggling. These are collectively known as NBIC-nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science.

If they can find people who understand other bits of the NBIC square-scientists have a notoriously narrow perspective—who knows what will happen when humans can start to read minds and use that power to control computers or artificial limbs? How about direct brain-to-brain communication? Now there's an advertising possibility.

It is no coincidence that when the US National Science Foundation sponsored a stuffy study on NBIC it called the final report Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. It's anybody's guess where the business opportunities are in there, but there they doubtless are, even if it could take another 60 years for some of them to materialise.
Given the pace of medical change, and the steady growth of the human lifespan—another opportunity for science to deliver business opportunities—many of today's readers may well be around to see the results.

Michael Kenward is a science writer and former editor of New Scientist.