Andrew J. Nelson

Organizational Modularity and Intra-University Relationships between Entrepreneurship Education and Technology Transfer

Both entrepreneurship education and commercialization of university research have witnessed remarkable growth in the past two decades. These activities may be complementary in many respects, as when participation in an entrepreneurship program prepares a student to start a company based on university technology, or when technology transfer personnel provide resources and expertise for an entrepreneurship course. At the same time, however, the activities are distinct along a number of dimensions, including goals and mission, influence of market conditions, time horizon, assessment, and providers and constituency. We argue that this situation presents an organizational dilemma: How should entrepreneurship and technology transfer groups within a university maintain independence in recognition of their differences while still facilitating synergies resulting from overlapping areas of concern? In response to this dilemma, we draw on the organizational modularity perspective, which offers the normative prescription that such situations warrant autonomy for individual units, but also require a high degree of cross-unit awareness in order to capture synergies. To illustrate this perspective in an intra-university population of entrepreneurship and technology transfer groups, we present network images and statistics of inter-group relationships at Stanford University, which is widely recognized for its success in both activities. The results highlight that dependence between groups is minimal, such that groups retain autonomy in decision-making and are not dependent on others to complete their goals. Simultaneously, cross-unit awareness is high, such that groups have frequent formal and informal interactions and communication. This awareness facilitates mutually beneficial interactions between groups. As a demonstration of the actual functioning of this system, we present three thumbnail case studies that highlight positive relationships between entrepreneurship education and technology transfer. Ultimately, we argue that to fully realize the synergies between entrepreneurship education and technology transfer, we must also recognize differences between them and ensure the autonomy that such differences warrant.

How to Share 'A Really Good Secret': Managing Sharing/Secrecy Tensions Around Scientific Knowledge Disclosure

The diffusion of scientific knowledge is critical for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Yet scientists face a fundamental dilemma when it comes to sharing such knowledge: sharing can simultaneously advance and challenge both academic and commercial interests. Although several studies explore the different reasons that scientists may or may not share, along with their overall propensity to do so, we have much less insight into how researchers who confront sharing/secrecy tensions attempt to manage them. In turn, our understanding of the ways in which scientists enable cumulative innovation through sharing, even as they attend to their private interests, remains limited. Based on qualitative analysis of 46 interviews and 58 oral histories with researchers in biotechnology and digital audio, I identify 4 tactics that researchers use to manage sharing/secrecy tensions—leveraging trust, strategic withholding, delaying, and patenting—and I analyze how the use of these tactics is tied to particular sharing practices, organizational environments (e.g., universities versus firms), and scientific fields. I then theorize how these tactics address different dimensions of sharing/secrecy tensions, working together as part of an integrated repertoire. Finally, I tie my findings to broader considerations around sharing, including managerial and policy initiatives aimed at promoting cumulative innovation.

“If Chemists Don’t Do It, Who Is Going To?” Peer-driven Occupational Change and the Emergence of Green Chemistry:

We investigate the emergence and growth of “green chemistry”—an effort by chemists to encourage other chemists to reduce the health, safety, and environmental impacts of chemical products and processes—to explore how occupational members, absent external triggers for change, influence how their peers do their work. Using extensive interviews, archival data, and observations, we find that advocates simultaneously advanced different frames that specified the utility of making the change: (1) a normalizing frame, positioning green chemistry as consistent with mainstream chemistry innovation; (2) a moralizing frame, positioning it as an ethical imperative; and (3) a pragmatizing frame, positioning it as a tool that could help chemists tackle problems they encountered in their day-to-day work. Each frame resonated differently with chemists in their various occupational roles. Though this pluralistic approach generated broad acceptance of the change effort, it also exposed tensions, which threatened the coherence of the change. Advocates’ diverse responses to these tensions contribute to a persistent state of pluralism and dynamism in the change effort. We uncover a process through which occupational members generate and sustain change, show how occupational heterogeneity can enable and delimit change, and show how well-meaning efforts to “moralize” occupational work can heighten resistance, inhibiting the very changes that enable experts to address urgent societal problems.

'A Towering Virtue of Necessity': Interdisciplinarity and the Rise of Computer Music at Vietnam-Era Stanford

Stanford, more than most American universities, transformed in the early Cold War into a research powerhouse tied to national security priorities. The budgetary and legitimacy crises that beset the military-industrial-academic research complex in the 1960s thus struck Stanford so deeply that many feared the university itself might not survive. We argue that these crises facilitated the rise of a new kind of interdisciplinarity at Stanford, as evidenced in particular by the founding of the university’s computer music center. Focusing on the “multivocal technology” of computer music, we investigate the relationships between Stanford’s broader institutional environment and the interactions among musicians, engineers, administrators, activists, and funders in order to explain the emergence of one of the most creative and profitable loci for Stanford’s contributions to industry and the arts.