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SESSION I: TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

We examine the challenges of commercialization of university-developed technology and the synergistic relationship of the university's technology transfer office with business-school-based entrepreneurship education programs. We postulate that business schools can effectively augment the university technology transfer office in developing and growing successful startups, through catalyzing the process of startup creation and by actively assisting in the formation of multi-disciplinary leadership teams for spinout companies. The assistance of the business school's alumni and entrepreneur networks can also be leveraged for both mentoring and investment. The challenges of an effective program include securing early marketing input, building effective leadership teams, negotiating the terms of technology licenses, and developing the enthusiasm and cooperation of faculty researchers. At Carnegie Mellon, we have developed an integrated entrepreneurship education program focused on opportunity recognition and strategy development, team building and leadership development, and resource acquisition and allocation. Our program actively assists in launching and supporting the resulting spinout companies by connecting entrepreneurs with value-added investors, support networks, and partners. In addition, we monitor and mentor the spinout companies through their startup and growth stages. Our program includes an aggressive cross-campus initiative in which we teach entrepreneurship courses in the science, engineering, and computer science schools (in addition to the business school) and conduct seminar series to reach faculty and graduate students within those areas of the university. We are aided in the program by the enlightened technology transfer policies that Carnegie Mellon adopted in 2001. The rationale and objectives of those policies are explained in a lengthy appendix. We illustrate the effectiveness of the model through discussion of three recent spinout companies. We conclude that university entrepreneurship education programs can significantly enhance the effectiveness of university technology transfer programs. To optimize that result, the entrepreneurship education program should extend beyond the walls of the business school and should actively assist in the creation of well thought-out business plans and the formation of well-balanced leadership teams actively monitored and mentored by the business school and its alumni and entrepreneur networks. Additionally, it is necessary to tailor the program to the specific character and needs of the region.

This paper aims to reconsider the significance of Henry Ford’s claim that “History is more or less bunk”. It argues that this seemingly philistine remark can be understood as a specific historiographical position which informed Ford’s wider worldview, management approach and philosophy of industry.

The paper draws on primary philosophical works, secondary criticism and archival evidence. These sources detail the context in which the claim was made, the ideas underpinning its articulation and the conceptual basis on which Ford’s wider perspectives and contributions to historical experience can be interpreted.

This paper interprets Ford’s claim as a gesture of allegiance to a deeper cultural sensibility that was informed by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental view of history.

In addition to offering a rereading of Ford’s historiographical position, Emerson’s thought is discussed in relation to Ford’s subsequent “living history” project (Greenfield Village), which is considered the materialisation of his historical and industrial worldview.

This interpretation reveals how a specific historiographical position held by one of the twentieth century’s leading industrialists offers new insights into his wider worldview and philosophy of industry. It contributes to recent studies that challenge taken-for-granted narratives in management history and recent work that has highlighted the influence of transcendental principles on Ford’s philosophy of industry.

When the first edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, Samuel G. Ward, a writer for the Dial, commented, “I am with all the world intensely interested in Emily Dickinson. She may become world famous or she may never get out of New England” (Sewall 1974, 26). A century after Emily Dickinson's death, all the world is intensely interested in the full nature of her poetic genius and her commanding presence in American literature. Indeed, if fame belonged to her she could not escape it (JL 265). She was concerned about becoming “great.” Fame intrigued her, but it did not consume her. She preferred “To earn it by disdaining it—”(JP 1427). Critics say that she sensed her genius but could never have envisioned the extent to which others would recognize it. She wrote, “Fame is a bee./It has a song—/It has a sting—/Ah, too, it has a wing” (JP 1763). On 7 May 1984 the names of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were inscribed on stone tablets and set into the floor of the newly founded United States Poets' Corner of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, “the first poets elected to this pantheon of American writers” (New York Times 1985). Celebrations in her honor draw a distinguished assemblage of international scholars, renowned authors and poets, biographers, critics, literary historians, and admirers‐at‐large. In May 1986 devoted followers came from places as distant as Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, and Japan to Washington, DC, to participate in the Folger Shakespeare Library's conference, “Emily Dickinson, Letter to the World.”

Governance network managers are charged with triggering and sustaining collaborative dynamics, but often struggle to do so because they come from and interact with hierarchical and competitive organizations and systems. Thus, an important step toward effectively managing governance networks is to clarify collaborative dynamics. While the recently proposed collaborative governance regime (CGR) model provides a good start, it lacks both the conceptual clarity and parsimony needed in a useful analytical tool. This theoretical chapter uses the logic model framework to assess and reorganize the CGR model and then amends it using Follett’s theory of integrative process to provide a parsimonious understanding of collaborative dynamics, as opposed to authoritative coordination or negotiated cooperation. Uniquely, Follett draws from political and organizational theory practically grounded in the study of civic and business groups to frame the manner in which integrative process permeates collaboration. We argue that the disposition, style of relating, and mode of association in her integrative method foster collaborative dynamics while avoiding the counterproductive characteristics of hierarchy and competition. We develop an alternative logic model for studying collaborative dynamics that clarifies and defines these dynamics for future operationalization and empirical study.

Companies inevitably interact and entrench in complex organic systems of business relationships with other. These business networks are not objectively defined, instead they are shaped by the subjective perception of actors. This inherent subjectivity is associated with the notion of network pictures, that is, a research tool that researchers or managers can use to grasp practitioner theories. In this chapter, we discuss how the importance of identifying these theories results mainly from underlying principles of sense-making theory, as well as from the idea around performativity. Drawing on these theoretical groundings, this chapter has two objectives: to explore how practitioners actually perceive their business surroundings and to assess the extent of overlapping between (IMP Group) academic theories and practitioner theories. To achieve these objectives, the researchers use a dimensional network pictures model previously developed in the literature to analyze the network pictures of 49 top-level managers across 17 companies from two very distinct contexts or networks: a product-based network and a project-based network. Among other practices, findings illustrate how practitioners tend to simplify what is going on in their complex surroundings, to personalize their relationships with those surroundings, and to think in a stereotyped way. Moreover, the juxtaposition between the captured practitioner theories and academic (IMP Group) theories show that these are not always overlapping, and are in some cases quite the opposite. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the importance of grasping actors’ views of the world, arguing that sense-making theory and the notion of performativity are the two main conceptual drivers justifying the urgency in making those views more visible. This research also adds to the research on the impact and suitability of IMP Group theories on managerial thinking and practice. Finally, this research reinforces the current call for further practice-based research in business network contexts.

Ethical attitudes are especially important for accounting students as they transition from higher education into a profession where continuing education requirements for ethics are pervasive across state boards. We examine if generational categorization impacts ethical attitudes. We compare 172 student responses from an ethical survey to results reported in the prior literature from 1997, 2004, and 2007. We find evidence consistent with current students becoming less tolerant of ethically questionable behavior. Also, we explore students with self-declared Certified Public Accountant (CPA) aspirations to other students revealing minimal differences. This suggests that discussions around ethical attitudes might be beneficial in the workplace as multigenerational individuals need to make subjective decisions when working together. More specifically, our study encourages the development of additional ethical vignettes that include technological innovation twists to foster more robust classroom ethics discussions as many students fail to find a significant ethical gray area with the traditional vignettes.

What may be another kinship of law and death? To suggest that death is a work may allow us (I hope misleadingly) to suggest, by way of something more than coincidence – but less than perfect parallel – that law is the very definition of absolute limit. In this sense law would be death’s shadow, a shadow cast by the sun of life as it shines on death, a sun toward which Giorgio Agamben seems to have been moving in his recent writing. (1998) And yet, as if in presumptive rebuttal, Michel Foucault convincingly suggested years before Agamben’s intervention, in a meditation on Maurice Blanchot, that “The law is the shadow toward which every gesture necessarily advances; it is itself the shadow of the advancing gesture” (Foucault, 1987, p. 35). Every gesture directs our attention away from the sun’s light and toward the cave of the everyday, where the fire may come, when it comes and if it comes, from places otherwise.