You can't really tell if you are putting your money into the right place. Sometimes the highest payoff for the future is finding out what won't work, but there's not much profit for investors in that discovery. He had in mind canals, but universities and research laboratories also come to mind. According to Whitesides, nanotechnology may require us to rethink our traditional research-university structures. We have done extremely well with the current model, a professor and his graduate students, but that is a structure largely adapted to specialization.
Nanotechnology requires something else.
First, it is multidisciplinary. Building multidisciplinary teams that can work together and trust each other is not easy. There has to be depth. A vague generalist approach generates dreams, but not a lot of solid foundation to build on. Specialists are needed.