Juha Tuunainen

Intermingling Academic and Business Activities: A New Direction for Science and Universities?

The growing role of universities in the knowledge economy as well as technology transfer has increasingly been conceptualized in terms of the hybridization of public academic work and private business activity. In this article, we examine the difficulties and prospects of this kind of intermingling by studying the long-term trajectories of two research groups operating in the fields of plant biotechnology and language technology. In both cases, the attempts to simultaneously pursue academic and commercial activities led to complicated boundary maintenance, which arose from the conflicting procedures and requirements of the two activities as well as from the double roles assumed by the actors involved. We, thus, argue that the construction of boundaries is not as contingent and strategic as has often been assumed but is built, instead, on the characteristic goals and tasks of the activities in question. Moreover, we suggest that the discussion on university—industry relationships and the entrepreneurial university has by and large neglected the fact that most universities are either public sector entities or tax-exempt organizations thereby being subject to strict rules and regulations that govern the ways in which they may become engaged in commercial activities. Furthermore, several other enduring cultural features, such as the university’s commitment to open scholarly communication, make the boundary between university and commerce relatively stable. As a consequence, the results of this study lend support to the thesis according to which boundaries in science are not always created at will but reflect the long history and multifaceted societal relevance of this particular institution. This in turn implies that the commodification of university research is bound to be more difficult than what the proponents of the entrepreneurial university seem to assume.

Learning and Network Collaboration in Product Development: How Things Work for Human Use:

This article studies the learning and capability formation of a biotechnology firm by analysing its development path, which is composed of successive product development and innovation processes. In collaborative product development work, network collaboration, as well as the acquisition of new competences and learning, evolves simultaneously and interactively. Searching for and encountering partners with complementary knowledge and resources is important in the emergence of new product-development processes. To improve understanding of this path formation, the article draws on cultural—historical activity theory, science and technology studies and the epistemology of things and effects. These all underline the significance of material artefacts for learning and activity. The epistemology of things and effects addresses the knowledge of how things work in experimental systems and products. Enzymes, proteins and instruments are put to work in a stabilized way as parts of new products. The effects so mastered entail the functional qualities that make products competitive in the marketplace.

Constructing Objects and Transforming Experimental Systems

The main contribution of this paper for social studies of scientific practice is to use and further elaborate the concept of experimental system. It is expanded from mere epistemic concerns to also incorporate the built-in practicality and societal relevance of scientific research. For this, an analysis of object construction by a potato-biotechnology research group is presented. The groups object of activity is conceptualized as a dual one comprisingboth the epistemic and applied objectives. The application object points to the virus-resistant cultivated potato under construction, the epistemic object to the knowledge on the virus-resistance mechanism. Two major phases of the groups work are perceived as distinct experimental systems. The transition between them is analysed in terms of a gradual evolution characterised by network collaboration, ad hoc improvization, resistance, opportunism and informal interaction.

Determining the Norms of Science: From Epistemological Criteria to Local Struggle on Organizational Rules?

Universities in the Western countries have become complex organizations involving many kinds of activities. Since the Second World War, the traditional functions of universities – academic research and higher education – have expanded simultaneously as universities have taken on a whole variety of societal service functions often termed the university’s third mission (Clark 1998). From the beginning of the 1980s, a central part of this changed landscape has been the commercialization of university research results. According to a number of analysts, this alteration, fostered by competitiveness-oriented national innovation policies (Slaughter and Rhoads 1996), has led to the intermingling of public university and private business activities. Four different conceptions of such hybridization can be identified. First, the concept of the “Mode 2” knowledge production (Gibbons et al. 1994) claims that traditional academic research has merged with the rest of society, including politics and the markets. Scientific knowledge has become “contextualized”, meaning that its scope has been expanded so that problems of various societal groups and organizations are set as the starting points of research, instead of purely scientific questions (Nowotny et al. 2001, pp. 65, 106). Second, the intertwinement of science, politics, and business life has created what David Guston (1999) has called boundary organizations, i.e., organizations that are responsible for more than one social world at once. Such organizations operate as initiators and sponsors of new projects, thus enhancing interaction across the boundaries of various activities. Third, the commercial potential of university research has given rise to university– industry research relationships, especially in the quickly developing fields of knowledge-based industries, such as information and communication technology and biotechnology (e.g., Powell and Owen-Smith 1998). In these networks, research is often distributed between three closely related organizations, i.e., public research institutes, companies and universities (Fransman 2001). Fourth, entire universities have sought to redirect their activities, giving birth to what was termed

BUILDING TRUST IN RESEARCH-BASED PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT COLLABORATION

The purpose of this paper is to enhance understanding of the development of trust during commercial product development collaboration. It elaborates on a performance-based conception of trust by analyzing the history of cooperation between two biotechnology firms. The means and mechanisms of trust formation in the different phases of this collaboration relationship are examined. The paper concludes that secrecy, collaborative and licensing contracts were necessary precautionary measures needed by the firms to move from one phase of collaboration to another. They contributed to the formation of intentional trust between the companies but had no role in creating competence trust between them. In contrast to this, actions directly related to product development work and marketing, such as training courses, feedback from clients, parallel testing, performing the agreed duties and keeping schedules, played a key role in the formation of competence trust.

High-tech hopes: policy objectives and business reality in the biopharmaceutical industry

This paper analyses Finnish biotechnology policy and combines this with a look at the evolution of a university spin-off companys business models. It offers a rare grass-roots perspective on policy implementation and further develops the business model concept. Business models should be understood as future-oriented ‘where-to’ artefacts that can be used to develop business activities to meet future economic demands. Concerning policy implementation, this paper highlights the obstacles that small companies encounter when they operate as part of the global knowledge-based economy, as well as describing the solutions that may be developed to overcome such hurdles. The paper concludes that the business activities of high-tech companies might be supported by: first, strengthening the public support systems of young companies; second, developing the business models of those companies so as to gain income early; and finally, focusing national efforts on building new industries in areas where some industrial tradition already exists. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.