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.

Keywords:

• Science commercialization
• regimes of knowledge production and diffusion
• academic entrepreneurship
• academic consulting
• academic patenting

Over the past 30 years, the commercialization of scientific and technological knowledge, ideas and competencies emanating from institutions of higher education and research has been intensely debated, particularly in the fields of science policy and educational, management, and innovation studies. It is generally acknowledged that, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a marked change took place in the organization of the university system and in the modes of scientific knowledge production and diffusion. There is also wide agreement that the proliferation of market-oriented ideas and practices was one of the distinctive features of this transformation. The causes of this shift were complex and contingent on specific national and regional contexts and circumstances. At the same time, it is clear that, across a variety of settings, many of the changes resulted from attempts to foster technological innovation as a path to competitiveness in a globalizing world, in a political-ideological climate receptive to economic justifications.¹

Although much of this debate focuses on the present situation and on future perspectives, derived from assessments of the short- and long-term effects of the above-mentioned shift, historians of science and technology are called in as well. For one of the issues at stake – and, in fact, a major one – is to what extent, and in what respects, the present organization of the production and diffusion of scientific knowledge represents a departure from the past.

The past that provides the benchmark for the analysis of this transformation is by and large the recent American one. It most notably comprises the changes that have been taking place in the US university system since the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong emphasis on twentieth-century developments.² There is an extensive body of literature addressing this process of change, including its causes and consequences, from either a macro- or meso-perspective or through more narrowly defined case studies. Inevitably, the time-span of the studies dealing with the same research problem in the European context extends to a more distant and more heterogeneous past.³

We start our introduction to this special journal issue on the commercialization of academic science by briefly describing how historians of science and technology have critiqued two influential interpretations concerning the transformation of the university system in the late twentieth century and have proposed alternative frameworks of analysis. Afterward we turn to more specialized research on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period at the center of this collection of articles. We draw on this literature to introduce and support the research approach adopted in this special issue, namely, a focus on the involvement of individual academic scientists in three types of commercial activity – consulting, patenting, and full-blown business entrepreneurship. Finally, in the last two sections of this introduction, we discuss some of the main findings of the special issue and reflect on their consequences for our understanding of the longer history of academic commercialization.

Continuity and discontinuity in macro- and meso-level analyses

When Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowotny and their colleagues first formulated the Mode 1/Mode 2 model in 1994, they characterized what they perceived as a radical change in the organization of academic institutions in terms of the agencies involved in the steering of research and of the ways in which priorities were set. Along with public and social accountability, trans-disciplinarity, and the capacity to network and to establish partnerships, they identified the growing sensitivity (and pro-activity) with regard to the market value of knowledge as one of the distinctive features of Mode 2. The authors subsequently extended and elaborated parts of their analysis, for instance, by more closely considering social transformations related to these modes. The emphasis on market orientation and practical problem-solving as distinctive characteristics of the new forms of knowledge production however remained.⁴

A direct engagement in the commercialization of academic knowledge is even more prominently one of the distinctive features of an alternative interpretive model, the Triple Helix.⁵ According to this framework, commercialization is the ‘third mission’ which is now complementing the traditional tasks of the university system, namely, education and research. Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff argue that the university is no longer just a secondary actor in the process of innovation and economic development. Instead, by taking an active role in not only the production but also the management of applied knowledge, the university has become a structural element in that process, along with government and industry. Far from maintaining arm’s length relationships with these latter two strands, universities are now closely interacting and co-developing with them. Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff argue that, although this form of interaction is distinctive and qualitatively new, it does not represent a radical departure from previous modes of operation. In fact, they describe the emergence of the present-day ‘entrepreneurial university’ as the result of an evolutionary process extending the role and functions of the ‘research university’ in the direction of increased efficiency.

It was precisely in response to these models that, from the camp of the history and sociology of science, attempts were made to address the issue of continuity and discontinuity in the modes of production of knowledge – and of the commercialization of science – in a long-term perspective. We refer in particular to two such interpretive frameworks, one of them coming from a historian of science and the other from a sociologist of science with a thorough historical background. By considering a more extended chronological framework, and with more attention paid to Europe, both Dominique Pestre and Terry Shinn – most recently in collaboration with Anne Marcovich – use the notion of regimes to analyze the characteristics of modes of knowledge production in different a) time periods and b) economic, political, and sociocultural settings.⁶ Their emphasis is on the historicity and the complexity of the modes of production of scientific knowledge, with special attention for the variety of institutional frameworks, including their political, administrative, social, and legal components.

According to Pestre and Shinn, science has always been important for economic and political powers, and its market value is by no means a recent discovery. In their view, elements of what Gibbons and Nowotny characterized as distinctive features of the present-day forms of knowledge production and commercialization can be found throughout the past few centuries – especially but not exclusively from the nineteenth century onward – but in different configurations depending on the regime. As Marcovich and Shinn clarify, each of the regimes ‘possesses its specific division of labour, organizational framework, internal rules, and hierarchy, universe of employment, form of product output, clientele and its particular system for circulation between production and market’.⁷ The emergence of new modes of knowledge production does not cause the disappearance of previous forms; instead, they coexist in parallel but interconnected systems.

Periodization is also at the basis of the analysis of one of the most vigorous denouncers of the market-oriented university system, the economist-historian Philip Mirowski. Considering the development of the laboratory in the United States since the late nineteenth century, Mirowski identifies a chronological sequence of three phases in the organization of science. Drawing on the work of Pestre, among others, he defines these stages as ‘temporally specific ‘regimes’ of economic and social organization, intertwined with changes in the ecology of the sciences themselves’.⁸ Each of these regimes is characterized by distinct relations between academia, industry, and the state. In the first period, from the 1890s until World War II, the US government played only a relatively minor role as a patron of academic science, and industrial and academic research activities developed largely autonomously from each other. Then, in the military-dominated cold war regime, academic science benefited from unprecedentedly high investments from governmental funding agencies and grew dramatically in size. From the 1970s and 1980s, by comparison – when the most generous levels of defense-related funding had been curtailed and universities perceived a need for additional sources of income – corporations stepped in and began to ‘outsource’ research work to academic institutions. The ‘globalized privatization regime’, which started in these decades, is characterized by the advance of market-oriented practices and intellectual property protection.⁹ It continues into the present and has witnessed the embedding of commercialization in the very organizational structure of the university system. This institutionalization of the economic function of the university is what Mirowski considers to be something fundamentally new.

Like other critical observers, Mirowski has a clear preoccupation with what he describes as the catastrophic, already irreversible outcome of ‘neoliberal’ pro-market policies and ideology on the university system. He is therefore wary of historical analyses of the relations between academic science and the economic sphere that could be interpreted as providing a historical legitimization of what he and other commentators regard as a turn for the worse. Accordingly, Mirowski strongly criticizes historian of science Steven Shapin, among others,¹⁰ for calling attention to what they considered to be qualitative precedents to current modes of science commercialization. Shapin indeed has repeatedly stressed that universities never were ‘ivory towers’. More to the point, he has argued that present-day market opportunities do not pose a threat to academic freedom that is qualitatively distinct from the centuries-old restrictions on universities’ autonomy associated with political and religious patronage.¹¹

More historians called in

To understand the genesis of the present-day ‘entrepreneurial university’, these analysts of the institutional infrastructure of scientific knowledge production and diffusion draw, to different degrees, on more narrowly defined historical case studies. In the regimes style of analysis pursued by Pestre and Shinn, historical examples of this kind are used effectively to evidence how different regimes offered the setting for distinct forms of knowledge commercialization. In other studies, however, they serve the purpose of buttressing different and in some cases opposite interpretations in support of discontinuity or continuity in the history of academic commercialization.¹²

At any rate, the evaluation of the positions outlined above is rendered difficult by the fact that historians of science and technology have so far tended to eschew the task of documenting, in a thorough and systematic way, the monetary aspects of knowledge production and distribution.¹³ This is especially true with respect to institutions of higher education and research: as we will argue below, even regarding the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – a time period when the market value of academic science became more evident – several key issues remain understudied. More precisely, historical analyses of the economics of science have focused primarily on the role of governmental, military, and private agencies in supporting research. As a result, the response of individual higher education employees to market opportunities has remained largely unexplored. The next section of this introduction will have a closer look at what is known about science commercialization in this era, which is at the center of this special issue. We will first briefly outline some relevant features of this time period. Afterward, we will draw special attention to three forms of commercial activity in which a significant number of academic scientists of the time engaged, namely consulting, patenting, and ‘full-blown commercial entrepreneurship’, that is, the involvement in business enterprises as founders, partners, and/or directors. Each of these activities is also widely practiced today, although in a markedly different context.¹⁴ Indeed, academic patenting, spin-off creation, and, to a lesser degree, consulting are considered characteristic contemporary forms of knowledge commercialization. Our focus on these types of activity therefore seems well-suited for contributing a longer term comparative perspective on the present-day commercialization of academic science.

Exploiting the commercial value of academic science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The changes in the organization of the rapidly expanding higher education and research systems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been thoroughly investigated, especially with regard to the scientific and technological areas of academia. When laboratories for teaching and research became a fundamental component of that structure, the setting up and maintenance of laboratory equipment and facilities imposed a new and ever increasing burden on the finances of academic institutions. When public agencies could not satisfy the costs, private sponsors had to be sought.¹⁵ The resulting engagement of the professoriate in the search for financial support is abundantly documented. So is the development of quasi-managerial skills in the organization and running of laboratories where teams of researchers had to be coordinated and the equipment and facilities had to be secured and maintained.

In relation to these financial and organizational challenges, the emergence of entrepreneurial behaviors at the institutional level has also been the object of extensive research. For instance, the development of the provincial colleges in Great Britain, notably those set in manufacturing areas, has been comprehensively discussed in this interpretive perspective.¹⁶ The same holds true for the reform of the provincial universities in France, as well as for the establishment and expansion of the physics and chemistry laboratories of the German universities and the new Technische Hochschulen.¹⁷ These initiatives were vigorously supported by local and regional governments on the basis of the explicit commitment of academic scientists to providing a foundation for socioeconomic and industrial progress. The main ‘product’ that was offered had the form of educational programs. However, it was in this period that other, more direct types of collaboration with partners in the spheres of economic production and service provision became more frequent. In the case of Germany, for example, the historian Timothy Lenoir has demonstrated how a strong political pressure ‘from above’ paved the way for new forms of partnership between the state, industry, and academia, as reflected in the creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes.¹⁸

What is still waiting to be explored in depth is the involvement of individual academic scientists – that is, members of the teaching staff of university-level institutions – in the commercialization of knowledge and expertise at a personal level, rather than on behalf of their employing institutions. In their writings on the professionalization of the sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians of science and technology have documented cases of academic scientists’ engagement in a variety of forms of for-profit work, including extra-mural lecturing and publishing activities. However, they have primarily examined them in relation to the popularization of scientific knowledge, without focusing on the economic and commercial dimensions of these efforts.¹⁹ They have also shown that new opportunities opened up for the commercialization of knowledge and expertise in this period. But, in this case too, much remains to be done with regard to the study of the economic value of these extra-academic activities. Due to challenges in identifying useful primary sources, among other reasons, the invitation to ‘follow the money trail’ has, when it comes to the commercial work of individual academic scientists, not yet resulted in systematic analyses.²⁰

As a contribution to this line of research, this special issue concentrates on three types of commercial activity that, as mentioned above, have been central to the contemporary debate on the emergence of new forms of knowledge production and diffusion: (1) consulting, (2) patenting, and (3) full-blown forms of commercial entrepreneurship. Consulting was the most common type, and the one on which empirical research is more abundant. One set of studies has examined the careers of individual academic scientists to identify their reasons for taking up industrial and other consulting assignments and to gain insight into the relationship between these activities and these scientists’ teaching and research duties.²¹ Other analyses have explored the histories of various specific forms of consulting work, including scientists’ role as expert witnesses in law courts, as testers and endorsers of inventions and technologies-in-use, as contractors, and as advisors to public and private agencies. The courtroom performances of scientific expert witnesses in Britain and the United States have been especially well examined; however, much of the literature on this topic does not give special consideration to academic scientists and the possible peculiarities associated with their status as employees of higher education establishments and, if applicable, as civil servants.²² Academics are, by comparison, more prominent in studies on some of the non-legal forms of consulting work, as well as in literature on the emergence and development of industrial research. However, in the absence of systematic inquiries, our knowledge of these different consulting activities is very fragmented, and the relationship between academic consulting and in-house industrial research remains open to debate.²³

Despite these limitations, this literature throws important light upon the consulting work of academic scientists from a number of disciplines. Academic chemists’ consulting activities, in particular, have been documented throughout the period under consideration. A large share of these activities directly related to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialization and urbanization processes that were transforming societies and economies around the world. These developments created a widespread public demand for expertise in analyzing the safety and quality of air, water, and food, to which chemistry professors, as well as nonacademic chemists, eagerly responded.²⁴ The chemical industry’s reliance on academic consultants, in contrast, appears to have differed greatly depending on the regional and national context, as well as on the profile of the employing higher education institutes.²⁵ Moreover, even in countries where a long history of industrial consulting work on the part of academic chemists has been documented, including Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, it remains hard to tell how widespread this work was and how it related to these scientists’ teaching and research activities.

There are indications that consulting work was also relatively common in fields related to chemistry, including geology and medicine, as well as among a heterogeneous group of scientists with an interest in the development of new scientific instruments and other research and teaching technologies.²⁶ In addition, there is some literature available on the consulting activities of engineering, physics, and life science professors.²⁷ However, in all of these cases, the need for systematic surveys seems even more pressing.

Academic patenting is another important form of commercial activity with a history that is much longer than is often thought. This practice was neither impossible nor insignificant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, legal history suggests that the traditional distinction between scientific discoveries and industrial inventions, on which the patent laws were supposed to be based, was a construct that was created only gradually.²⁸ Beyond this question of principle, the possibility of patenting specific products gave an opportunity to academic scientists to obtain a temporary monopoly on some of their discoveries or industrial inventions, whether chemical compounds or mechanical and electrical devices. Various important scientific figures did not hesitate to take out some patents, including Justus Liebig, Louis Pasteur, and William Thomson, the latter of whom filed no less than 74 applications between 1854 and 1907.²⁹ It remains to be seen how representative these cases were, but, considering the relatively small size of nineteenth-century scientific communities, they were certainly not negligible.

It should be stressed that academic patenting did not necessarily have a commercial motivation since patents were sometimes used to protect scientific priority or to prevent industrialists from imposing their own monopoly by appropriating inventions and discoveries made by others.³⁰ But these strategies did not exclude the pursuit of personal profit. In fact, the aim of academic patenting could vary according to the economic, scientific, and institutional contexts which scientists faced. In this respect, a significant change occurred in the late nineteenth century with the development of a new wave of industrialization and with the increased institutionalization of scientific research.³¹ In organizations such as the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt and the National Physical Laboratory regulations concerning patenting were adopted already in the first years of activity.³² These establishments were to an important extent engaged in applied research, and they highlighted the role of patents as a way of regulating the collaboration between their scientific employees and industrial firms.

This process became clearer around the turn of the twentieth century, when big firms in science-related industries began to systematically use patents as tools for establishing economic monopolies.³³ This context led new scientific institutions to elaborate an appropriate framework concerning patenting, especially if they had to take into account the preferences of industrial sponsors. For instance, the different institutes of the German Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, created in 1911, adopted various regulations on this issue.³⁴ In the United States, the Research Corporation, which was created in 1912 in order to manage the university chemist Frederick Cottrell’s patent on an electrostatic precipitator, illustrates the same ambivalence towards patenting.³⁵ In the 1920s, with a series of medical discoveries (for instance, concerning hormones), patenting became a way for scientists to control production and commercialization processes in order to ensure the quality of new treatments.³⁶ The combination of these changes led to strong debates about scientific patenting in both the US and in Europe.³⁷

All these works suggest that academic scientists far from ignored the possibility of applying for patents before the recent rise of the ‘market university’. Contrary to approaches that make a strict distinction between scientific authorship and intellectual property rights,³⁸ they show that there was not necessarily a strong opposition between publishing and patenting, or between scientific and commercial activity.

Still less attention has been paid so far to the engagement of academic researchers and teachers in full blown forms of commercial entrepreneurship, by which we refer to their involvement in the creation of firms or participation in them as partners and/or directors. Some nineteenth-century examples are very well known, most notably William Thomson’s (Lord Kelvin’s) partnership in a consulting firm (not just as a ‘private consultant’), Ernst Abbe’s collaboration with Carl Zeiss, Henry Rowland’s telegraphy enterprise, Justus Liebig’s participation in a British-German fertilizers enterprise, and Louis Pasteur’s beer fermentation process and anthrax vaccine firms.³⁹ Undoubtedly, what makes these cases so frequently referred to is the scientific reputation of the protagonists. They are also very often presented as exceptional on the reasoning that, before the late twentieth-century changes mentioned at the beginning of this article, academic scientists had generally been reluctant to engage in entrepreneurial ventures.⁴⁰

Admittedly, in the case of chemistry historical studies indicate that setting up in business was not infrequent already among academics of Liebig’s generation (and earlier ones).⁴¹ However, it is undeniable that full-blown entrepreneurship was not as common a form of commercial practice as consulting and, except in fields or countries where academic inventions could not be protected by formal intellectual property rights, patenting. What remains to be ascertained is how widespread it was, by also extending the exploration to less famous academics. Moreover, even with respect to often mentioned cases such as those of Thomson and Pasteur, more work remains to be done. In particular, a broader range of primary sources could be used to learn more about how these scientists managed their business activities. It would also be worth investigating how the strategies and practices adopted in their firms compared with those of non-academic entrepreneurs.

Another aspect that remains to be examined more systematically is the relationship between full-blown commercial entrepreneurship and patenting. This link was often very strong, for in many cases academics, individually or in collaboration with partners, established firms precisely to develop and commercialize their inventions. However, in other instances full-blown commercial initiatives were not based on patents, as with the creation of professional consulting firms.

The themes and contributions of the special issue

The articles in this collection take stock of the literature outlined in the previous sections of this introduction, as well as of the different roles historical case studies have played in the ongoing debate on the distinctiveness of the modes of scientific knowledge production that emerged since the 1970s. However, in parallel with a very recent trend in research on contemporary university-industry relations and commercialization practices,⁴² they seek to shift the emphasis from the development and effectiveness of institutional infrastructures meant to support university technology transfer to the agency of individual academic scientists.

More precisely, the essays try to integrate macro- and meso-level approaches to the study of science commercialization with a thorough examination of behavioral patterns of individual scientists, thus aiming to reach a better understanding of how the opportunities offered within particular contexts were actually identified, assessed, and translated into practices. Accordingly, the authors examine the ways in which individual academic scientists perceived and evaluated their institutional and professional environments, their career prospects, the commercial value of their knowledge and reputation, and their ability to exploit it.

All of the contributions explore the profiles of academic scientists within a well-defined framework of three different but related typological forms of commercial work, namely consulting, patenting, and full-blown business entrepreneurship. They show how, in some cases, these different activities built on each other. Patenting and consulting work, for example, could – but need not – serve as stepping stones toward entrepreneurial engagements as founders or directors of firms. In other instances these activities were pursued autonomously from each other, but reflected the same mix of financial and nonfinancial motives. Economic benefits were clearly an important inducement, all the more so when the salary of academics was significantly below what they believed was the potential income obtainable from their scientific expertise and their inventions. However, it is by no means obvious that financial gain was the main motivation. As the articles in this collection illustrate, other equally important factors were at play, most notably these scientists’ desire to obtain tangible recognition of the value of their work and the determination to keep their teaching and research activities relevant and up to date. Moreover, in some cases commercial activities served as a way of obtaining vital financial resources to support the ever growing costs of laboratory facilities and large research teams.

Considering this mix of reasons, it may not be surprising that all of the contributions point to a close, and sometimes fundamental, relationship between academic scientists’ teaching and research activities on the one hand, and their commercial work on the other. They indicate that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only engineering professors were convinced of the commercial value of their academic knowledge and authority and often eager to exploit those assets. Physicists with an interest in applied electricity were, much like a rapidly growing number of molecular biologists in the late 1970s and 1980s, also keen on extending their sphere of activity in that direction. Moreover, academic scientists of various disciplines – mainly but by no means only chemists – likewise responded, as well as contributed, to the rapid growth of the photographic industry in the same time period.

The first two articles address these themes with a focus on employees of the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg (TH Charlottenburg) in the decades around 1900. As Wolfgang König indicates in his contribution on the mechanical engineers Franz Reuleaux and Alois Riedler, Prussia’s Technische Hochschulen were, like the technology institutes of other German states, expected to contribute to industrial development. The school’s professors did this primarily through their teaching activities, which could be closely linked to some of the commercial activities in which they participated. Riedler, for example, involved the staff of the private engineering office that he had established when joining the TH Charlottenburg in 1888 in his educational work. Somewhat similarly, as Joris Mercelis shows in his article, the photographic scientist Adolf Miethe claimed that his extensive consulting services to multiple optical firms were indispensable to the effectiveness of his classes. Riedler’s and Miethe’s personalities, backgrounds, and scientific orientations strongly differed from those of, respectively, Reuleaux and Hermann Vogel, the first head of the TH Charlottenburg’s photochemical laboratory. Nevertheless, each of these four scientists participated in an entire spectrum of commercial activities in the course of their decades-long careers as higher education employees and civil servants, including in the formation of new business enterprises meant to commercialize academic inventions. Reflecting on the representativeness of their respective in-depth case studies, König and Mercelis more generally suggest that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was relatively common for engineering professors and academic scientists with an interest in photography to get involved in commercial work. Moreover, as Mercelis emphasizes, the latter group did not just include teachers and researchers based in establishments that, like the Technische Hochschulen, were institutionally committed to industrial development objectives. But, at the same time, both articles show that an involvement in commercial activity could carry a substantial cost, particularly when it risked undermining notions of objectivity and neutrality cherished by these scientists’ supervisory authorities. Complaints about conflicts of interest resulting from Riedler’s commercial engagements, as an example, were discussed in special hearings in the Prussian Parliament in 1908. And two of Vogel’s and Miethe’s colleagues at the Department of Chemistry and Metallurgy, the private lecturers (Privatdozenten) Victor Griessmayer and Alfred Junghahn, resigned from the TH Charlottenburg when facing disciplinary sanctions for their provision of dubious ‘expert opinions’ (Gutachten) that had been integrated into commercial advertisements.

Like König, Anna Guagnini deals with a community that was rapidly expanding in the decades around 1900, namely, that of the academic engineers. Her survey of engineering professors at British higher education establishments shows that most of these academics engaged in at least one of the forms of commercial work examined in this special issue. In the period under consideration, one of the reasons which encouraged them to extend their activity beyond the academic walls was a system of payment based on students’ fees. Given that the number of engineering students was relatively low in the decades before World War I, extra-academic practice, especially in the form of consulting, was a convenient way of supplementing one’s income. But, in the case of these professors, too, nonfinancial motivations such as the desire to stay abreast of the latest industrial developments also contributed to the appeal of their parallel occupations. Those reasons did not disappear with the abandonment of the capitation system after World War I, and the slow increase in the salary scale for such higher education employees. The academization of engineering did not reduce their impact either. Guagnini’s survey also covers the extra-academic work of physics professors based at the same higher education institutes in the same period. This part of her analysis indicates that the engagement in extra-academic work was essentially limited to a specific segment of the community: those physicists who had an interest in the practical applications of electricity and, like their engineering colleagues, special expertise in the design of measurement instruments. Those few individuals were, however, remarkably active as patentees and as protagonists of business initiatives. Once again, economic reward was not the only motivation. The attempt to retain (or gain) some control over the direct practical application of knowledge and expertise pertaining to their disciplinary sector was also a way of countering perceived misappropriations of their intellectuals assets by professional inventors and industrialists.

This kind of motivation also transpires from Shaul Katzir’s more detailed study of a selection of American and German physics lecturers, most of whom shared a special interest in the industrial applications of electricity with Guagnini’s commercially most active physicists. Katzir stresses that, although all of them tried their hand at patenting, only some made their property rights the cornerstone of commercial enterprises. This further step was most common in those cases in which the chances of obtaining secure, permanent positions at a senior academic level were low. Building on the previously discussed regimes of knowledge production framework proposed by Anne Marcovich and Terry Shinn, Katzir addresses an important theme, namely the transitory nature of some academic scientists’ involvement in commercial work. However, what emerges is that although those who made the transition to that form of activity retained an interest in scientific research, it was not practicable to return to academic occupations once they had been abandoned. For these physicists, he suggests, it was a one-way transition rather than a temporary move away from scholarly pursuits.

In the final contribution to this special issue, Brian Dick and Mark Jones examine how, in the late 1970s, molecular biologists dealt with a situation that, despite the very different context, shared some significant similarities with the one faced by physicists in the 1880s and 1890s. Prior to the biotechnology boom of the 1980s, molecular biologists were, just like physicists had been before the advent of the ‘electrical age’, much less accustomed to commercial work than colleagues from fields such as chemistry and engineering. Dick and Jones do not deny that, as other historians have discussed, a combination of institutional and scientific developments in the decade up to 1980 – ranging from pro-patent measures and the increased availability of venture capital to the discovery of recombinant DNA – contributed to a dramatic change in this state of affairs over a relatively short period of time.⁴³ However, they argue that, to understand the rise of biotechnology entrepreneurship, it is crucial to also consider the role of ‘star scientists’ such as Walter Gilbert, the Harvard professor and 1980 Nobel laureate, and the influence they had within their disciplinary communities. Drawing on a comprehensive set of oral history interviews, Dick and Jones discuss how Gilbert, as well as various other molecular biologists on both sides of the Atlantic, were invited to join the advisory board of the Biogen startup firm. In view of the likely criticisms of other life scientists, as well as the uncertainty about the attitudes of their academic employers, this was not an obvious step to take. Yet, the involvement and support of Gilbert, who even became the CEO of Biogen in 1982, helped alleviate concerns of other molecular biologists about possible harmful consequences of the entrepreneurial venture for the continuation of their scientific research work as well as their academic careers.

Avenues for further research

Individually and collectively, the articles in this special issue thus raise important new research problems concerning the history of academic commercialization. Several of these questions result from the issue’s focus on the commercial activities of individual academic scientists, rather than the development of institutional infrastructures meant to support university technology transfer. As the case study on Walter Gilbert and Biogen illustrates, this is a perspective that remains pertinent with respect to the final decades of the twentieth century. But, at the same time, it is undeniable that, in the course of that century, higher education establishments started to play an increasingly proactive role in controlling, managing, and exploiting commercially valuable assets generated by their employees.

The point applies to each of the three major forms of commercial activity examined in this special issue. The formal industrial research fellowships and cooperative engineering courses that were created in the early twentieth century, as an example, were meant to fulfill some of the very same functions that academic scientist-consultants had previously carried out at a personal level.⁴⁴ When it came to patenting, as mentioned earlier, some academic teaching and research institutes on both sides of the Atlantic had already introduced regulations and/or established intellectual property management facilities prior to World War I. Many more did so in the interwar period and, especially, the second half of the twentieth century. As a result, most analyses of post-World War II academic patenting only consider patents that were directly managed by universities and their technology transfer offices. Finally, with regard to full-blown commercial entrepreneurship, the hands-off approach that seems to have been common among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century higher education establishments can be contrasted with the recent proliferation of new programs and organizational forms meant to support the creation of university spin-offs.⁴⁵

As is shown in a second group of papers initially presented at the conference on which this special issue is based,⁴⁶ academics played a crucial role in this process of creating and developing formal institutions structuring universities’ relationships with industry, as well as with other spheres of social life. Did the increased presence of such institutional designs, whose development could be both time- and resource-intensive, contribute to a decline of for-profit work that was carried out at a personal level? Although this may seem plausible, we strongly doubt that academic scientists stopped conducting commercial activities on their own behalf – rather than on behalf of their employers – once the pursuit of such activities had become more clearly regulated and/or institutionalized. This is not to suggest that individual faculty and staff members of higher education institutes have never refrained from engaging in this type of activity. There can indeed be no doubt that, even irrespective of the implementation of formal measures to prevent or control such work, there have always been economic, political, and/or sociocultural factors and circumstances that rendered it unattractive or even detrimental to at least parts of the academic community. Nonetheless, we are convinced that the extensive forms of personal-level commercial activity that this special issue documents in relation to fields that were rapidly expanding in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as electrical and photographic technology, later shifted to biotechnology and other new focal areas rather than disappeared. This hypothesis is consistent with the findings of a rare systematic and long-term analysis of the involvement of individual higher education employees in commercial work.⁴⁷ If true, it would ask for a reassessment of the evolving pattern of academic commercialization over time. In particular, the issue of continuity and discontinuity in the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of such extra-academic activities may have to be reconsidered, including the status of supposed turning points such as the world wars.

The existence of a significant undercurrent of commercial work carried out at academic scientists’ own initiative would be consistent with the view that higher education systems have historically been able to simultaneously accommodate various regimes of knowledge production and diffusion. It would also support an interpretation defended in several of the contributions to this special issue, namely, that the availability of relatively large amounts of public and/or philanthropic funding for research did not necessarily reduce academic scientists’ involvement in commercial work. Supporting research was, after all, only one of various motives for participating in commercial activities, and often not the most significant one.

On the other hand, the regulations adopted in different countries and higher education and research establishments are likely to have had at least some impact on academics’ involvement in commercial work. In particular, they may have directed these scientists to forms of commercial activity that were considered acceptable or even desirable by their employers and supervisory authorities. Unfortunately, very little is known about the nature of these regulations and their evolution over time. Accordingly, we consider their examination as a particularly promising avenue for further research.

Finally, we would like to emphasize that there is much scope for extending the study of academic commercialization to fields other than those covered in this special issue, including in the social sciences and the humanities. It would certainly be wrong to assume that disciplinary areas outside of the engineering, physical, life, and medical sciences have no significant histories of commercial engagement. Patenting, to be sure, was often not a possibility for non-natural scientists and engineers. The extent of other academics’ engagement in alternative forms of commercial activity remains, however, to be determined.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

This special issue builds on the conference ‘Academic entrepreneurship in history,’ held in Ghent, Belgium, on 12–13 March 2015. We wish to thank Kenneth Bertrams, Matteo Serafini, Eric Vanhaute, and Christophe Verbruggen for their help in organizing the event, and all conference participants for the stimulating discussions. We are also grateful to the anonymous referee for the valuable comments and to Martin Collins for his generous assistance and encouragement.

Notes

1. E.g. Berman, “Not Just Neoliberalism”; Bud, “From Applied Microbiology to Biotechnology”; Mody, The Long Arm of Moore’s Law; Mok, The Quest for Entrepreneurial Universities in East Asia.

2. Contributions that also cover nineteenth-century developments include Carlsson et al., “Knowledge Creation”; Kargon and Knowles, “Knowledge for Use”; Rosenberg and Steinmueller, “Engineering Knowledge.”

3. Clark, Academic Charisma; Wakefield, The Disordered Police State, chapter 3.

4. Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge; Gibbons, “Higher Education Relevance”; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons, Re-Thinking Science; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons. “Mode 2 Revisited.”

5. Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, “The Triple Helix-University-Industry-Government Relations”; Leydesdorff and Etzkowitz, “Emergence of a Triple Helix”; and numerous subsequent publications.

6. Pestre, “Production of Knowledge”; Pestre, “Regimes of Knowledge Production”; Marcovich and Shinn, “Regimes of Science Production and Diffusion.”

7. Marcovich and Shinn, “Regimes of Science Production and Diffusion,” 35.

8. Mirowski, Science-Mart, 91.

9. Mirowski, Science-Mart. On the privatization regime, see also, for instance, Berman, Creating the Market University; and Mowery et al., Ivory Tower and Industrial Innovation.

10. E.g. Greenberg, Science for Sale.

11. Shapin, “Ivory Trade,” 19; see also Shapin, The Scientific Life and “Ivory Tower.”

12. E.g. Shane, Academic Entrepreneurship, chapter 3.

13. E.g. Andersen, Bek-Thomsen, and Kjærgaard, eds., ‘Focus: Follow the Money’.

14. E.g. Louis et al., “Entrepreneurs in Academe”; Perkmann et al., “Academic Engagement and Commercialisation.”

15. E.g. Fox and Guagnini, Laboratories, Workshops and Sites; Cahan, An Institute for an Empire.

16. E.g. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester.

17. For France, see, e.g. Paul, From Knowledge to Power; Nye, Science in the Provinces. For Germany, see Borscheid, Naturwissenschaft, Staat und Industrie; Cahan, “The Institutional Revolution”; Cahan, An Institute for an Empire.

18. Lenoir, “Revolution from Above.” See also, e.g. Laitko, “Friedrich Althoff und die Wissenschaft in Berlin.”

19. E.g. Lightman, “Lecturing in the Spatial Economy of Science”; Topham, “Scientific Publishing.”

20. Andersen, Bek-Thomsen, and Kjærgaard eds., ‘Focus: Follow the Money’.

21. Auger, “Régime de recherche utilitaire”; Sanderson, “Professor as Industrial Consultant”, Tweedale, “Geology and Industrial Consultancy”; Watson, “The Chemist as Expert.”

22. Golan, Laws of Men and Laws of Nature; Gooday, “Liars, Experts and Authorities”; Hamlin, “Scientific Method and Expert Witnessing”; Arapostathis and Gooday, Patently Contestable; Lucier, Scientists & Swindlers; Smith and Wynne eds., Expert Evidence.

23. On product evaluations and endorsements, see Dienel, “Professoren als Gutachter,” and the additional studies cited in Joris Mercelis’ contribution to this special issue. On the provision of commercial testing and contract research services, see Auger, “L’université au service de l’industrie,” and Servos, “Engineers, Businessmen, and the Academy.” On academic scientists’ role as advisors to local and national governments, see references in n. 24 below. On the relationship between academic consulting and industrial research, see, e.g. Bertrams, “Converting Academic Expertise”; Marsch, Zwischen Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft; Reinhardt and Travis, Heinrich Caro; Sanderson, “The Professor as Industrial Consultant.”

24. E.g. Hamlin, A Science of Impurity; Scholliers, “Constructing New Expertise”; Warner, “How Sweet It Is.”

25. In the Netherlands, for example, the chemistry professors of Delft Institute of Technology and Amsterdam University generally had closer ties with industrial firms than their disciplinary colleagues at other academic establishments. See Homburg, Rip, and Small, “Chemici, hun kennis en de industrie.” For a case study that considers industrial chemical consulting in relation to a changing context, see, e.g. Misa, “Changing Market.”

26. On geology, see the above-mentioned publications by Tweedale and Lucier. On medical consulting, see, e.g. Swan, Academic Scientists and the Pharmaceutical Industry. On academics’ contribution to the development of new research and teaching technologies, see Joerges and Shinn eds., Instrumentation, and Wittje, “Simplex sigillum veri.”

27. Examples include Cookson and Hempstead, A Victorian Scientist and Engineer; Kargon, The Rise of Robert Millikan; Harwood, Technology’s Dilemmas, 58 and 138.

28. Simon, “Reinventing Discovery.”

29. Brock, Liebig; Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. On Thomson’s patents, see Anna Guagnini’s article in this special issue.

30. For Britain, see MacLeod and Radick eds., “Owning and Disowning Invention.”

31. Arapostathis and Dutfield eds., Knowledge Management and Intellectual Property.

32. Cahan, An Institute for an Empire, 243; Moseley, “The Origins and Early Years of the National Physical Laboratory.”

33. Fisk, Working Knowledge; Maestrejuan, “Managing Invention.”

34. Rasch, “Aud dem Weg zum Diensterfinder.”

35. Mowery and Sampat, “Patenting and Licensing University Inventions.”

36. Cassier and Sinding, “Patenting in the Public Interest.”

37. Mowery and Sampat, “University Patents”; Miller, “Intellectual Property and Narratives of Discovery/Invention.”

38. Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science, II.”

39. Smith and Wise, Energy and Empire; Feffer, “Ernst Abbe”; Brock, Liebig; Morris, “Commerce and Academe”; Cassier, “Producing, Controlling, and Stabilizing Pasteur's Anthrax Vaccine.” Galvez-Behar, “Louis Pasteur, Entrepreneur.” For an example from a country that is not covered in this special issue, namely Italy, see Guagnini, “A Bold Leap into Electric Light.”

40. For two different perspectives on this supposed reluctance, see Etzkowitz, “Entrepreneurial Scientists,” and MacLeod, “Reluctant Entrepreneurs.”

41. Gustin, “Emergence of the German Chemical Profession,” 142–146; Klein, “Technoscience avant la lettre”; Carnino, L’invention de la science, chapter 6.

42. Perkmann et al., “Academic Engagement and Commercialisation”; Rothaermel, Agung, and Jiang. “University Entrepreneurship.”

43. Recent contributions to the substantial literature on biotechnology entrepreneurship in the U.S. include Rasmussen, Gene Jockeys; Smith Hughes, Genentech; and Yi, The Recombinant University.

44. See Wadhwani et al., eds., “Academic Entrepeneurship.”

45. On the former approach, see, besides the contributions to this special issue, also Morris, “Commerce and Academe.”

46. This was the meeting “Academic entrepreneurship in history,” held in Ghent, Belgium, on 12–13 March 2015. For the second group of articles, see Wadhwani et al. eds, “Academic Entrepreneurship.”

47. Kaataja, “University Researchers.”