Prelims

A New Renaissance Heralded by the Scientific Enterprise

Scientific entrepreneurship is the science of freedom from ill-being, breaking down the barriers between human health, that of other living species and nature.

‘I think, I act and therefore I construct’ is the hallmark of scientists who promote entrepreneurship and sometimes are new venture creators. As the various forms of art, science can surprise people and stimulate fantasies and passions within them. In science, as in art, imaginative minds draw models that must adopt a second nature to have a practical effect. This second nature is the attitude to entrepreneurship.

At the dawn of the Renaissance, artists and scientists began the work of dismantling everything for centuries taken for granted. In 1482, and for the next 15 years, Milan stood on the shoulders of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the universal genius at the service of Ludovico il Moro (1452–1508). As the art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) put it, Leonardo was a ≪truly admirable painter, sculptor, art theorist, musician, writer, mechanical engineer, architect, scenographer, master metal worker, artillery expert, inventor, scientist≫. Leonardo not only gave Milan and its surroundings an artistic identity, but he also helped to mark the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. Thus, a new era began in Milan and its surroundings, introducing the profile of what would become the modern manufacturing entrepreneur.

The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed scientists mainly engaged in the study of gases and electricity. Even before common sense, they were guided by an enthusiasm that endangered, for example, Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–1790) life when he flew a kite in an electrical storm, writes Bill Bryson. Today, one encounters scientists whose discoveries fuel the entrepreneurial process around things and events that are fundamental to life on Earth. What is more, scientists themselves wear entrepreneurial clothes, and entrepreneurs contribute to the scientific process.

In the early days of the industrial revolution, Giovanni Aldini (1762–1834), a scientist from the University of Bologna and nephew of the physicist Luigi Galvani, renowned for the discovery of animal electricity, visited together with the economist Luigi Valeriani (1758–1828), professor at the same university, the new technical and professional schools in France, Great Britain, Germany and Belgium, learning the best practice of the new technical education and training on offer in Europe. The fruit of their travel was first the gestation and then the foundation of a technical school. A self-sustained trend of new firm formation resulted from a cross-fertilisation process between in-company learning-by-doing training and formal education at the technical school for new mechanical qualifications. The encounter between the scientist and the economist and their intellectual nomadism led to the regeneration of the preindustrial revolution experience in promoting the link between education and entrepreneurship as an essential condition of development in the wool and silk textile manufacturing, whereby Bologna was at that time renowned in Europe. The entrepreneurial spill-overs of the actions pursued by the entrepreneur-scientist show a long queue. We have to wait until the 1920s for the birth in Bologna of the packaging machinery industry – today, a world-leading industrial cluster.

Throughout nearly a century and a half, the Bengali renaissance was an innovative milieu of social and religious reformers, giants of letters and scientists such as Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), among the pioneers of research in radio technology, and Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974), best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s. They tilled the territory on which tech start-ups were seeded and grew and now enrich the digital economy landscape.

Science and scientific entrepreneurship: a gradual double revolution. The oxymoron is only apparent. The gradualism of the revolution depends on hastening slowly, that is, on the readiness of action combined with the slowness of careful reflection. The gradualism is also due to the non-coincidence between the time the revolution breaks out and the time of the ordinary people’s perception and understanding of it. It was the case with the ‘scientific revolution’, roughly between the mid-sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. As with the emergence of classical mechanics and the chemical revolution, the unfolding quantum revolution opens up a vast horizon of possibilities for scientific entrepreneurship. The changes it brings are protracted processes, and how they unfold over time depends on the cultural traits of the social community involved. These include the characters of the educational and research institutions that play a crucial role in the knowledge economy. The community at the University of Stuttgart runs a podcast called Made in Science. It features scientists, alumnae and alumni, employees and students from that University. ≪The conversations are not only about the interviewee’s current work, they also focus on their personality, what inspired them, and their career. One thing that all of the guests have in common is that they have studied or worked at the University of Stuttgart, or are still doing so, i.e. they are ‘Made in Science’. How did they become who they are? Looking back, what would they do differently?≫. Made in Science is the outcome of the scientific and entrepreneurial communities’ co-evolution in a long-term process. Its strength lies in discovering things hidden beneath the standard knowledge maps. The Greek philosopher Parmenides (fifth century BC) argued, ‘Nothing comes from nothing’, and prior experience is the source of understanding how to depart from it. Intuition and foresight make today’s most advanced knowledge obsolete, opening up spaces to draw new maps. These, once consulted, give free rein to businesses, products and services that would otherwise be inconceivable as being at odds with common sense by uncovering surprising elements and unexpected juxtapositions.

Made in Science embodies the science of human nature that aroused Adam Smith’s (1723–1790) interest, as David Hume (1711–1776) pointed out. Within this science lies the transformation of capitalism. Mercantilist capitalism gave way to Keynesianism, which, in turn, was replaced by neoliberal capitalism. Today, having to redress sharp and growing wealth inequalities in the face of political, social and natural upheavals, the search for new entrepreneurial behaviour turns against neoliberalism. Made in Science challenges the established knowledge system that considers the market an end in itself. Activist capitalism comes to the fore, which adopts ethical criteria. Its fundamental missions are to combat the inequalities of predatory capitalism and to do what is suitable for the planet, conserving and protecting wild nature. This is, for example, what Patagonia aims to do by producing high-end outdoor clothing and investing in companies founded by scientists to help solve the environmental crisis. The Californian company has sold 98 per cent of its capital, relinquishing voting rights, to the non-profit Holdfast Collective, which is to deploy the profits not reinvested in the company for environmental initiatives. The remaining two per cent is allocated to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, made up of scientists and experts in the green economy.

With the increasing concentration of power and wealth, predatory capitalism causes the ‘Made in’ to slide towards the ‘Made in Luxury’, socialising with Mr Snob as depicted by the Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929). Snobs are gratified by owning material goods that represent a status symbol: in fact, they reject anything that is not exclusively for the wealthy few. They love conspicuous consumption, purchasing at sufficiently high prices – their demand is directly proportional to price, rather than inversely – to ensure the luxury and exclusivity of what they buy. With rising costs, they ostentatiously display prestigious properties, luxury cars, yachts, works of art, precious carpets and what else. On the contrary, engaged in solving complex problems originating from multiple causes that are hard to interpret, Made in Science is invaluable and inclusive. The price of a vaccine or a good with a climate-protecting environmental certificate so high as to exclude the majority from buying it would aggravate an ongoing epidemic and the greenhouse effect, respectively. It would also jeopardise the well-being of those with such a well-having state. Deeply embedded in Made in Science is the concept of a common good all together we must protect.

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Made in Science versus Made in Luxury

One does not recognise at first glance the scientists and entrepreneurs who prefer to solve entirely new problems and do not beat the roads marked by the detailed knowledge maps available. They prefer to discover avenues that do not exist on those maps. In the health field, scientists and scientific entrepreneurs combine their skills to bypass impassable frontiers according to available maps. They do so by being open-minded to information gaps and accepting the uncertainty managed by the exercise of intelligence as to whether their explorations in unknown research lands will work or not. It is the case, for example, with the reinvention of cancer treatment, reported by the Financial Times on 14 August 2022. Animal experimentation gives way to an innovative technology replicating a miniature human tumour in a dish: a tumoroid. Thus, innovative therapies based on human genes and cells or even customised for patients are being used that might not work at all on animals.

Starting from what is known about the world and driven by creative drives and passions, scientists and scientific entrepreneurs formulate thoughts translated into actions that do not automatically lead to social progress. For this to happen, the scientific enterprises that arise from their thinking and acting should be shaped to bring progress to society as a whole. The civilisation of machines first and the technological-digital development later, and the enterprises in their wake, have ended up distributing the benefits, both social and economic, unevenly throughout society, extracting more and more value from the workers but less and less for their benefit.

The scientific enterprise is not a machine built according to the industrial model established in the successive ages of industrialisation. Having reached maturity, that model moulded a routine value creation based on the performance metric of efficiency and incremental improvements of ‘what we have always done’. In short, work has been done by digging into the soil of previous experience and, thus, relying on links with the past. The catastrophic risks threatening humanity and the planet ask for enterprises that leverage scientific discoveries to achieve radical innovations. In doing so, they tear up the cultural roots of the new always built on the old proper of ancient Greece.

The scientific enterprise has the shape of a tree growing in all directions under the impetus exerted by the intersecting forces of science and entrepreneurship. Its model envisages explosive value creation based on deep literacy of new effective ways of thinking and working at the intersection of science and entrepreneurship, thus fostering new offerings for collective well-being.

The upside-down sciencepreneurship tree

The fruits of the scientific enterprise tree are counter-intuitive possibilities.

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The tree is upside down to give light to its roots featuring the culture of the sciencepreneurship.

The figures of the scientific thinker, the business creator, the organiser of science and entrepreneurial activity, and the persuader of the goodness of initiative stand out in one or more persons. Growing expectations foreshadow university scientists – lecturers, post-docs, or graduate students – intentionally engaging in academic entrepreneurship to commercialise technologies derived from university research. Their entrepreneurial identity, the ‘who am I?’, is comparable to that of the Flemish innovator and influential cartographer, cosmographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594), who depicted the ‘outside’ world – that world beyond typical experience – which had been precluded from view before him, thus paving the way for long-distance trade. The entrepreneurial scientist unveils another external world whose landscape is dotted with paths along which scientific discoveries run towards the entrepreneurship that translates them into achievements for the collective well-being. Ways of producing, working and, indefinitely, the living are changing. In turn, a new world opens up for the academic entrepreneur who has to learn how much effort starting a company requires, primarily to launch and conduct pilot experiments for problem-solving. Market research involves a scientific approach to generating hypotheses about who might want the product and testing whether they want it. This research can be faster-paced and more goal-oriented than academic studies, and it may be necessary to change gears quickly. In the academic world, what does not work is not a problem: one moves on to the next project. In the business world, if something goes wrong, the company’s survival is promptly questioned.

The encounters between scientific progress and entrepreneurship have given rise to subversive entrepreneurial figures. Most innovators think of change as an extrapolation of past events. They try to improve on what they already know how to plan and do. The probability (a logical insight, nor a fact of nature) of success can be measured: the risk lies in the measurement. Others who draw inspiration from scientific breakthroughs advance into the dark night of unmeasurable uncertainty. For them, ignorance is no obstacle to action. Their behaviour seems to resonate with the lesson of Frank Knight (1885–1972), an American economist at the University of Chicago, who argued that uncertainty and paradox are rooted in human existence. One of these is Akio Morita (1921–1999), co-founder in Tokyo in 1946 of a company that later changed its name to Sony. A physics graduate from Osaka Imperial University, Akio was the eldest son and heir of one of the oldest sake producers. The young Morita showed a strong inclination for higher studies in applied physics, as well as curiosity and aptitude for the then-nascent electronics, enriched by a passion for music he inherited from his mother and, last but not least, supported by a centuries-old legacy of entrepreneurship.

Are we witnessing an unprecedented intersection between science and entrepreneurship, with those figures sowing the seeds of a new Renaissance? The Renaissance has been a long thread running through the centuries. Think of the European Renaissance of the Middle Ages; the Timurid Renaissance in Asia between the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603–1868); the Bengali Renaissance of the Indian subcontinent between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries; the American Renaissance at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the ‘New Culture Movement’ in China in the 1910s and 1920s. And today? There is no definitive answer. Growing entrepreneurial seeds make no noise. Instead, one hears the sound of corporate crises distinctive of state changes due to significant transformations whose work dismantles everything taken for granted for so long and the din caused by bankruptcies.

Among the hitherto unfinished (if it ever began) works of disruption is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whose yardstick is ill-suited to the purpose of the natural unfolding of scientific entrepreneurship for the health of the Earth, which, as Aristotle argued, is subject to corruption and decay. The fact is that national economic accounting struggles to operate as part of a much larger system of knowledge that goes through a series of upheavals in the unfolding of human history. Unlike nature, which takes great care not to generate superfluous or useless things, GDP is fed abundantly by what is not needed. If the yardstick of economic activity were commensurate with the merit of nature’s wisdom, we would find in place of the GDP indicators such as the ‘Genuine Progress Indicator’. The GPI incorporates social and environmental factors not measured by GDP, including the costs of ozone depletion, the escalation of crime and poverty on a nation’s economic health. The objection that the GPI and other alternative indicators to GDP present non-economic and excessively subjective variables reflects the depth of disciplinary silos in the terrain of economics, knowledge sinks that do reject a transdisciplinary and heterogeneous knowledge package.

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In a solid Ptolemaic set-up, GDP is at the centre of the system and GDP accountants play the role of intermediaries linking GDP to politicians. Among the latter, there is the one who presides over the entire system to establish a social order that refers to GDP as a natural (if not religious) fact even before it is historical. It matters little that this order imposed by the sphere of the state harms the most vulnerable social groups, if only because the effects of environmental damage fall mainly on their shoulders. Resuming with our words what Shakespeare (1564–1616) in his Julius Caesar has Calpurnia say, nothing happens when an ordinary man dies from wounds inflicted on nature. If, on the other hand, it is a political figure or a GDP accountant who dies, storms of lightning and thunderbolts brighten the sky. Ultimately, GDP accountants would rather be perfectly wrong than approach the side of reason, not neglecting the scope of curiosity-driven research for economic indicators off the beaten track.

Acknowledgements

Scientific discoveries have consequences that go beyond our preconceived understanding of the world. The change in perspective triggers transformative processes of entrepreneurship. Scientific production is the midwife of scientific entrepreneurship. Both offer humanity the ability to cope with changes in the ‘Earth system’ due to human activity and open the door to the age when humans and artificial intelligence together will help the Earth survive. The embrace of science and entrepreneurship is, therefore, the answer to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene and the Novacene, as expounded by Paul Crutzen (1933–2021) and Eugene Stoermer (1934–2012) – one a 1995 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and the other a biologist – and James Lovelock (1919–2022), a pioneer of environmentalism, respectively. The Anthropocene is the geological era purportedly incubated by the first industrial revolution that ushered in human activity capable of exerting a dominant influence on climate and the environment. The Novacene is assumed to represent the age of hyperintelligence from the encounter between human intelligence with its wise and ethical conduct and artificial intelligence with its algorithms and models. The qualities of human conduct allegedly prevent artificial intelligence from causing harm to individuals and society.

Science and entrepreneurship are joined in an embrace involving scientists and humanists, scientists who create businesses from their discoveries and entrepreneurs whose business is due to scientific production. What unites them is being abstruse thinkers whose critical thinking encompasses science, technology and the cultivation of the humanities and fine arts. I wrote Sciencepreneurship inspired by these entanglements and let the mind go to late eighteenth century Europe when St Patrick’s College was founded in 1795 in Maynooth, Ireland, which broke down the barriers between disciplines and specialisations. Every student, without exception, undertook a wide range of studies that included, in addition to Theology, Humanities, Rhetoric, Fine Arts, Logic, Mathematics and Physics. Father Nicholas Joseph Callan, Professor of Natural Philosophy at that College, demonstrated the transmission and reception of wireless electricity with a device now known as an electrical transformer. Professor Callan is best known for his research on the induction coil and for building the largest electric battery of its time. Callan’s work contributed to entrepreneurial fertility during the first industrial revolution. The induction coil that Callan invented in 1836 was commercialised by the German instrument maker Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff (1803–1877) starting in 1851. The intertwining of the discovery, the entrepreneurial translation and subsequent improvements is such that the invention of the induction coil was attributed to Ruhmkorff.

The University of Maynooth has not ceased to renew the legacy of Callan’s time, constantly enriching it with new content. Witness the transdisciplinary architecture of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI). Founded in 2006 in collaboration with Intel, the Institute is an open innovation community that allows an engaged and agile research approach to significant research challenges related to Digital Transformation.

My research work in the knowledge economy owes much to IVI. I sincerely thank the Director of the IVI, Professor Markus Helfert, and all my colleagues for their unwavering support. I extend my thanks to the President of Maynooth University, Professor Eeva Leinonen, the Vice President for Engagement and Innovation, Professor Brian Donnellan, and the entire academic community of this university. My research was echoed in the Italian academy thanks to the commitment of Professor Fabrizio Dughiero of the University of Padua, Pro-Rector for technology transfer and business relations. I thank him for allowing me to initiate ideation processes from the encounter between science and entrepreneurship at the ‘Contamination Lab Veneto’ Summer School in Cortina d’Ampezzo.

I wish our students, researchers, and the entire academic community to cultivate both the fields of science and humanities to reach the first step of sciencepreneurship. Putting one’s mind and foot down is no small feat; it would mean being a citizen of the city of ideas. Obtaining such citizenship is a very demanding thing. If you feel like the young poet Evmenis who, having just composed only one idyll, complained to Theocritus, read Constantine Cavafy’s poem ‘The First Step’. You will gain courage.

Maynooth, October 21th, 2022