Anna Guagnini

Academic entrepreneurship and institutional change in historical perspective

Abstract This article provides a historical perspective on academic entrepreneurship and its role in institutional change, and serves as an introduction to a special issue devoted to the subject. Unlike approaches that define academic entrepreneurship narrowly as the commercialization of academic research, we argue that historical research and reasoning justify a broader conceptualization focused on the pursuit of future forms of value in academic knowledge production, application, and transmission. Understood in this way, academic entrepreneurship has long been a significant driver of institutional change, not only within the academic world but also in shaping the organization of markets and states. The article develops this argument in three major sections. First, it draws out themes implicit within the historiography of science and technology that highlight the role of entrepreneurship in reshaping academia and its relationship to society. Second, it establishes conceptual foundations for more explicitly examining the processes by which academic entrepreneurship acted as a driver of institutional change. Finally, it synthesizes the findings of the articles in the special issue pertaining to these entrepreneurial processes. The article concludes by arguing for the role of history in rethinking academic entrepreneurship in our own time, and by outlining directions for further research.

Ivory towers? The commercial activity of British professors of engineering and physics, 1880–1914

Abstract The involvement of British academic scientists in commercial work has been often discussed by historians of science and technology. However a systematic study of this activity is still lacking. Focussing on the period 1880 to 1914, I examine the engagement in consulting, patenting and entrepreneurial initiatives of a segment of that community, namely engineering and physics professors. I discuss the institutional context in which it occurred and their motivations. The survey highlights that the majority of the engineering professors examined were involved in consulting and patenting, and a significant number of them pursued also entrepreneurial activities. As for the physics professors, only a few followed the example of their engineering colleagues, but did so vigorously. I argue that far from being reluctantly brought into the market for knowledge, the engineering as well as the physics professors who engaged these extra-academic activities eagerly sought to partake in the commercialization of the products of their scientific work.

Commercializing science: nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic scientists as consultants, patentees, and entrepreneurs

Abstract The collection of essays introduced in this article contributes to the debate on the commercialization of academic science by shifting the focus from institutional developments meant to foster university technology transfer to the actions of individual scientists. Instead of searching for the origins of the ‘entrepreneurial university,’ this special issue examines the personal involvement of academic physicists, engineers, photographic scientists, and molecular biologists in three types of commercial activity: consulting, patenting, and full-blown business entrepreneurship. The authors investigate how this diverse group of teachers and researchers perceived their institutional and professional environments, their career prospects, the commercial value of their knowledge and reputation, and their ability to exploit these assets. By documenting academic scientists’ response to market opportunities, the articles suggest that, already in the decades around 1900, commercial work was widespread and, in some cases, integral to academics’ teaching and research activity.

JOHN FLETCHER MOULTON AND GUGLIELMO MARCONI: BRIDGING SCIENCE, LAW AND INDUSTRY

Several Fellows of the Royal Society had a role in the achievements of Guglielmo Marconi. Among them was John Fletcher Moulton. An outstanding undergraduate mathematician at Cambridge who maintained a lifelong interest in electricity, Moulton went on to become one of the most formidable lawyers practising in the London courts. His collaboration in the preparation of Marconis first UK patent in 1897 marked the beginning of an important association with Marconi and the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company.

Definitions, interactions and beyond: response to Carlson, Galambos, Musselin and Wright

ABSTRACT Responding to the commentators on the two special issues (in Management and Organizational History and in History and Technology) devoted to academic entrepreneurship in historical perspective, we renew our invitation to adopt a broad definition of the term entrepreneurship, and elaborate on our view that it can be a heuristically valid tool in the analysis of historical change in the academic, political, and social worlds. We agree, in particular, that more research needs to be carried out on the relationships between the institutional and commercial aspects of entrepreneurship in academia, and how the two aspects coalesced into forms of “organized entrepreneurship” at the university level. Particularly promising in this regard would be historical research on the interdependencies between entrepreneurial processes at the individual and organizational levels, the changing roles of administrative officers and governing bodies of institutions of higher education, and shifts in the regulation of academics’ outside activities. Studies of the changing ways that business people and organizations integrate academic knowledge into products and enterprises in collaboration with academic partners would also contribute to this research agenda. For all the obstacles and difficulties arising from differences of interpretation across disciplines, interdisciplinary scholarship between history and the social sciences remains promising as a way to engage in research on the evolution of academic entrepreneurship, as well as an effective way to question the relevance of our concepts in our own disciplines.