In 1996, having moved to the NSF from the University of Kentucky, Michael Roco proposed the idea of a large-scale financial and scientific project in the field of nanotechnology. He set up a group of experts to prepare reports on the status of research and development prospects in ten areas related to nanotechnology. March 11, 1999 at a meeting of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Roco made a proposal to establish the National Nanotechnology Initiative with a budget of $ 500 million. In the summer of 1999 the group's experts lobbied the initiative with the National Science Foundation, Department of Defence, Department of Energy, NASA, National Institutes of Health, and National Institute of Standards and Technology. Since then, these six organisations have been the basis for the National Nanotechnology Initiative. In December 1999 the initiative was approved by President Clinton. In January 2000, President Clinton announced the initiative when he spoke to students at Caltech, which was a kind of official starting point in the development of nanotechnology in the U.S. Public funding of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative allocated in the 2011 budget amounts to $ 1.8 billion.

Continuing to work actively in the NSF, Michael Roco often serves as the honorary speaker at numerous high-tech conferences and wrote several books on the philosophy of science. Since 2001, together with sociologist William Bainbridge, he has been promoting the idea of converging the nano-bio-info-cognitive technologies (NBIC).