In the past decades, nanotechnology which is not considered a sector by itself but a highly dispersed multidisciplinary area has been on a rise not only in terms of papers and patents but also in terms of applications. A review on paper and patent production for the period 2000e16 shows that United States is the dominant player both in publications in top journals and also in patents although China has shown a relevant growth (Zhu et al., 2017). A recent survey has tracked the patent production in the field of nanotechnology (Ozcan and Islam, 2017), using the patent provider Thomson Innovation. The study shows that there are around 50,000 patent inventions, of which around 30,000 are owned by corporations, around 14,000 by inventors, around 11,000 by academia, and almost 2,000 by government. The shared patents explain the difference in the total. Of course, as Fig. 1 in the paper of Ozcan and Islam (2017) shows, different countries show different proportion of owners in the patent production. Inventors are the majority of the owners in United States. With regard to corporates, the United States and Japan have similar levels of patent ownership. France, for instance, has a higher proportion of government ownership, while in China its academia has the largest proportion. Of course it is important to take into account the method used for patent retrieval because the authors point out that there are some patents on the nanotechnology class that are not related to this field. Sabatier and Chollet (2017) using bibliometric data and a survey of French nanotechnology scientists showed that promoting groundbreaking , innovative research provides an important advantage for future scientific production. However, it is important not to overemphasize the importance of patents because van Raan (2017) showed that only a small amount of patents represent important, "radical," technological breakthroughs. Also in an important essay, Archibugi (2017) mentioned that intellectual property rights may delay the diffusion of knowledge and that disruption by itself does not necessarily lead to progress or to greater economic efficiency, and if it is not properly managed it can lead not only to company losses, but to societal damages as well. In fact, Shapira and Youtie (2015) mentioned that many nanotech sales forecasts were adjusted downwards because some of the promised scale benefits are unlikely to be realized. On one hand complex nanomaterials may not be very environmental friendly and life cycle assessment (LCA) may require further Nanotechnology in Eco-efficient Construction.