Contesting a Hybrid Firm at a Traditional University

Abstract

This paper presents a challenge to the idea of what some scholars have called the entrepreneurial university. By applying and elaborating on Thomas Gieryn’s concept of boundary work, it offers evidence to the effect that developing an entrepreneurial university is not as straightforward as it may seem from a more generalized perspective. Developing such an entity, at least in the confines of traditional, public-funded universities, is complicated by the emergence of a boundary between public and private activities. This study focuses on a potential hybrid research group: an academic group that sought to fuse its research with potential business activity within an ordinary university department. Controversies over four distinct issues arose: 1) the bureaucratic authority of a department chairman, 2) the allocation of teaching loads, 3) the ownership of research tools and materials and 4) the intellectual property rights of the researchers. Ultimately, the controversy was resolved through a formal written contract that established two boundaries: a border between the social roles of university researchers and those of private entrepreneurs, and a physical separation of the work done by academic projects from that of corporate development. As a result, the hybrid research group/firm was ‘purified’ into a private entity with no direct ties to the university.

Plant biotechnology for deeper understanding, wider use and further development of agricultural and horticultural crops

“…Studies on potato biotechnology at DAB were continued in a joint project with the plant breeding unit of the MTT Agrifood Research Finland (MTT) and Boreal Plant Breeding Ltd. A few years later, UniCrop Ltd was founded by some of the researchers at AF-UH and the commercially oriented lines of plant biotechnology research moved to the company. The chain of events leading to establishment of plant biotechnology at AF-UH, including the challenges and difficulties in fitting academic studies and commercially oriented research into the same laboratory at a university department, have been reviewed in detail by Tuunainen (2005aTuunainen ( , 2005b.…”

Advancing Understanding about the Relationship between Science, University and Society – An Introduction

“…Münch, 2015;Wadmann 2014;Brown, 2010;Tuunainen and Knuuttila 2009;Tuunainen, 2005;Krimsky, 2003), Slaughter and Leslie maintain that academic, commercial and bureaucratic cultures are integrating and that the distance between universities, industries and governments is decreasing. Instead of being organisations oriented towards producing scientifi c knowledge under strong institutional autonomy, universities in this perspective are becoming engaged in what other scholars have called entrepreneurial, commercialised, privatised and post-academic science (e.g.…”

Cultura emprendedora, innovación y competencias en la educación superior. El caso del Programa GAZE

“…ticulación universidad-empresa, considera a los grupos de investigación como cuasi-firmas, ya sea porque desarrollan proyectos conjuntamente con empresas (alianzas de cooperación organizadas sobre principios empresariales) ya sea porque se comportan como tales frente a la comercialización de sus productos (patentes), y a la vez promueve la creación de empresas de base científica y tecnológica (spin-off) (Etzkowitz, 2003, Tuunainen, 2005. Se trata de una universidad orientada hacia el mercado.…”