Gabriel Galvez-Behar

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.

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.

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.

Institutional enterprise as a compromise: the national organization of science in France

Abstract Institutional entrepreneurship implies the capacity of actors to mobilize resources to create institutions in which collective action is embedded. Its historical analysis may consider it as a long-term process involving the role of different generations of actors and highlighting such phenomena as transmission and competition. Inspired by institutional analysis, this paper examines these temporal dynamics of institutional change by focusing more particularly on the nature of competition between different institutional enterprises in the early twentieth-century French scientific field. It highlights also the role of the State, which plays a particular role by ensuring stability. Part 1 examines the efforts of several institutional enterprises to shape the Caisse des recherches scientifiques, one of the first national organizational reforms of French science. Part 2 focuses on World War I, which provided opportunities to lay the foundations for a new organization of science. Part 3 examines the subsequent reorganization of science during the interwar period. It presents the creation of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1939 as a new compromise resulting from a long cumulative process. The last section sums up the different theoretical issues and insists on the specificity of institutional change within the scientific field.

L’innovation a-t-elle joué un rôle dans la naissance de l’administrative science ?

Parmi les transformations profondes que connait le monde industriel a la fin du XIXe siecle, l’introduction des activites de recherche scientifique et les enjeux de l’innovation ont vraisemblablement plus marque la carriere et la theorie de Fayol qu’on ne l’a jusqu’a present reconnu. Dans quelle mesure, au-dela du cas de Fayol, l’innovation a-t‑elle joue un role dans la naissance des sciences de gestion ou de l’administrative science ? Quelles etaient l’etendue et la realite des liens entre sciences et industrie au debut du XXe siecle ? Et comment se sont organises – a cette epoque – les liens entre le management, devenant une science, et la recherche scientifique plus generalement ?

Petites et moyennes entreprises face au développement international de la propriété industrielle

La propriete industrielle possede une fonction strategique pour les entreprises. Ces dernieres assument cependant cette fonction de maniere differenciee selon leur taille, leur secteur d’activite ou leur degre d’exposition a la concurrence. Comment font-elles face au cout de la propriete industrielle ? Quel est le role des conseils et des avocats specialises ? Comment les dirigeants apprehendent-ils ces questions ? Comment les salaries sont-ils pris en compte ? Telles sont les interrogations au cœur de ce debat. Les principaux deposants de brevets dans le monde sont essentiellement de grands groupes. Parallelement on connait l’importance des PME dans la dynamique de l’innovation. Comment ces dernieres s’approprient-elles, pour ainsi dire, la propriete industrielle ?