Entrepreneurship and Knowledge Exchange

Jay Mitra,John Edmondson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317748120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Imprenditoria
• Index: Business

Over the last several decades there has been a growing interest in the relationship between entrepreneurship and university-industry collaboration, namely how such cooperation can benefit entrepreneurship development at individual, national, and regional levels. While there are several refereed journal articles on different aspects of university-industry cooperation, most studies dwell primarily on instruments such as spin-offs, incubators and graduate entrepreneurs. This collection offers the first book-length compendium of international comparative perspectives on university-industry cooperation.

Entrepreneurship and Knowledge Exchange explores insights from a wide variety of countries of relevance to researchers as well as policy and decision makers, especially those working in developing economies. Seminal contributions from top academics in the field, such as Alan Gibb, Peter Scott, and Mary Walshok, are included. The issues of knowledge transfer, entrepreneurship, and regional/national economic regeneration have inspired countless programs and initiatives at national and regional levels, and the chapters in this book examine these initiatives, providing both a reference work and a record of practical experience.

Part I:
History, Context and Challenge

The impact of research and education on industry

A comparative analysis of the relationship of education and research systems to industrial progress in six countries

Terry Shinn

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the relationship of science and technology research capacity and the development of education systems to industrial performance. In an exploration which maps developments over the last 150 years, the author takes as his subjects for study six countries – three with outstanding industrial achievement (Germany, Japan and the USA) and three whose growth has been less impressive (England, France and Russia/USSR). Although, the author argues, industrial performance is on the whole not linked directly either to research or education, he finds a strong association between economic development and the ways in which various policies and systems have allowed research and education to interact with industry. The analysis points up what have historically proved to be either positive or inhibiting mechanisms in the promotion of industrial innovation. The paper concludes by placing this analytical review in the context of the future development of industry–research–education interactions and a critical summary of key contemporary theories concerning the sociology of innovation.

Terry Shinn is with the Groupe d’Etude des Méthodes de l’Analyse Sociologique (GEMAS), CNRS, La Maison de Sciences de l’Homme, 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France. Tel: [phone].

This paper explores the impact of science and technology research capacity and educational change on industrial performance in the century and a half since 1850. Analysis covers three countries remarkable for their industrial achievement (Germany, the USA and Japan) and three countries whose growth has often been relatively less impressive (England, France and Russia/USSR). Research and education are both residual factors of economic behaviour. Unlike monetary, fiscal and investment factors, labour and material costs, and market forces, residual elements are not amenable to rigorous quantitative treatment. While residual properties like research and education may be quantified, nevertheless, qualitative considerations and interpretation are paramount.

Today, most scholars agree that education (as a general phenomenon) does not constitute a linear, direct determinant of industrial growth.¹ For example, Fritz Ringer has shown for the 19th and early 20th centuries that, although German and French education had numerous parallels, such as per capita size of cohorts, the economic development of the two nations was indeed extremely different.² Peter Lundgreen, who has compared the size of France’s and Germany’s engineering communities and the character of training, has come to much the same conclusion.³ Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini, in a comparative study of education and industry in six European countries and the USA for the decades before the First World War, demonstrate that, although nations had contrasting rates of industrial growth, it was the case that their educational policies and practices nevertheless frequently converged.⁴

The existence of a direct and linear connection between research and industry is also today viewed as doubtful. Two instances exemplify the complexity of the relationship. During the decades immediately preceding and following the First World War, very few French firms possessed any research capacity, and with scant exception, neither was applied research present inside the educational system. Still, France’s industry advanced at a steady albeit slow pace, largely thanks to alternative innovation acquisition practices such as patent procurement, licensing and concentration on low-technology sectors.⁵ In large measure, France’s industrial capacity was derivative, often depending on the importation of technology from abroad.⁶ By contrast, on the morrow of the Second World War, the USSR boasted an immense fundamental and applied research community, in the 1960s and early 1970s surpassing in size that of the USA.⁷ In spite of this, Soviet industry grew very slowly – even catastrophically so!

In this essay, I will argue that while industrial performance is rarely coupled directly either to research or to education, it is nevertheless the case that economic development is strongly associated with a bi-modal factor of research/education. Only when interacting in a particular fashion does their potential to promote industrial innovation emerge. I will furthermore suggest that in order to be effective, research must be vested with specific structural attributes that enable industry to benefit and that the same holds for science and technical education. A range of historically positive and inhibiting mechanisms will be set forth. I will conclude with a twin discussion of contemporary theories of science/industry change (the ‘new production of knowledge’ and the ‘triple helix’ model) and of human capital theory as regards the industry–research–education triad.

Heterogeneity and uniformity: Germany versus France

Scholars agree that the final third of the 19th century saw a sharp change in the relations of capitalistic industrial production; in effect, the birth of the ‘capitalization of knowledge’.⁸ Systematic and formalized learning emerged as a crucial component of industrial processes, alongside the existing key elements of capital, equipment, labour and investment. Before the mid-century, technical training had largely taken the form of apprenticeship. The elaboration of industrial novelty had been left to chance and frequently originated in sources exogenous to industry. With the capitalization of knowledge, however, scientific and technical capacity acquired the guise of formal learning, which assumed a central role within firms; and appropriately differentiated education arose which offered the required concepts, technical information and skills. Similarly, industrial innovation was no longer left to isolated, private inventors. Applied research was increasingly promoted inside firms, and government and academia also sponsored applied science- and engineering-related investigations. By all accounts, Germany was the first nation to move toward the capitalization of knowledge, and accordingly, it developed a range of well-adapted educational sites and research establishments.

In the half century before the First World War, German industrial performance was truly staggering on numerous counts. It suddenly moved ahead of England and France in the middle of the century. Germany spearheaded the second industrial revolution; and in doing so it set historical record after record for economic growth. But precisely how contingent was this impressive achievement on education- and research-associated elements? The renowned Technische Hochschulen are often portrayed as the linchpin of German educational service to industry in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, and beyond this as an exemplar of what education–industry relations can achieve.⁹ Between 1870 and 1910, three new schools were added (Aachen, Danzig and Breslau) to eight previously established institutions in Prussia and the other Lander (Berlin, Karlsruhe, Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart, Hanover, Braunschweig and Darmstadt).

They provided technical education in science, engineering and applied research to tens of thousands of industry-minded men. By around 1900, instruction at the Technische Hochschulen had become four pronged: (1) deduction of technical rules from industrial activities; (2) deduction of technical rules from natural laws; (3) adaptation of sometimes abstruse calculating techniques for industrial needs; (4) systematic research into materials and processes applicable to industry. Between 1900 and 1914 alone, the Technische Hoschschulen graduated over 10,000 exceptionally qualified students who flooded an already saturated labour market. Alumni became engineers in manufacturing firms in areas associated with chemistry, electricity (and later also electronics), optics and mechanics. Many rose to positions of top management, and some became directors of firms. Technische Hoschschulen offered five to seven years of instruction, after 1899 optionally leading to a doctorate degree. The right to grant this diploma was hard won and achieved only after a 20-year bitter struggle against the nation’s well-entrenched universities. Until the end of the century, the German university enjoyed an uncontested monopoly over doctoral education. The victory of the Technische Hochschulen was singularly important, for it was emblematic of the newly acquired high status of engineering and technical learning and represented tacit admission of the crucial position of industry in the rapidly modernizing German social order.

Integration – structural and fortuitous

The late-19th-century emergence of Germany’s highly acclaimed Technische Hochschulen, whose reputation was totally entwined with industrial success, was part of a broader educational and cultural transformation. Until the mid-century, classical humanistic education, Bildung, had comprised the foremost and almost uncontested form of education in Germany. Classical learning was the hallmark of the educated, traditional bourgeoisie, and such learning was acquired in the very exclusive Gymnasium and universities. Humanistic training alone had conferred social legitimacy. After 1850, however, a measure of ‘modern’ learning began to penetrate Germany’s educational system. Realgymnasium, which stressed pragmatic/utilitarian curricula such as science, technology and modern languages, began to rival the humanistic Gymnasium, and it was from these schools that the Technische Hochschulen recruited their students. During the latter decades of the century, the students enrolled in modern secondary schools far outnumbered those in classical Gymnasium, and the employment opportunities linked to the modern technological and industrial stream were growing rapidly both in number and prestige. In the latter third of the 19th century, then, science- and technology-related learning had come to occupy a place near the summit of the educational hierarchy alongside erstwhile humanistic learning. Industrial technology had become a mechanism for achieving considerable social and political legitimacy.¹⁰

However, recent historiography has cast doubt on the causal character of the Technische Hochschulen in late 19th-century German industrial performance. Wolfgang Konig claims that before 1900 it was not highly advanced technical learning that spurred industry but instead intermediate technical skills. The Technische Hochschulen played a less central role in German economic growth than is generally considered to be the case. Their primary objective was competition with the traditional universities, as they sought to climb in the educational hierarchy. To achieve the desired end, it had been necessary to demonstrate competence in relatively academic, as opposed to more utilitarian, industrial fields of teaching and research. It was only after 1900, when the Technische Hochschulen had successfully challenged the universities, that they turned their full attention to concrete industrial development, and they did so with remarkable success.¹¹

Konig insists that before 1890, it was not the Technische Hochschulen but rather a range of mixed, somewhat lower-level institutions of technical education which drove the expansion of Germany’s economy; namely, the Technische Mittelschulen. This constellation of schools prospered particularly in the 1870s and 1880s. The constellation was composed mainly of innumerable local, small training institutes that had flourished in the many Lander along the entirety of the century. Unlike the Technische Hochschulen, during this critical period the Technische Mittelschulen catered specifically and exclusively to industry, and Konig claims that their graduates (and often not those of the Technische Hochschulen) temporarily comprised the key source of technical innovation in the traditional domain of mechanics, as well as the science- and technology-intensive domains of chemistry and electricity. They offered full-time instruction in eminently practical topics. The duration of courses was generally 12 to 18 months, after which graduates immediately entered industrial employment. They were acknowledged as high-quality technicians, and many became a sort of in-house engineer. Their worth lay in the rare capacity to combine skill and utilitarian knowledge. Significantly, Konig’s conclusions complement the argument of Ringer, who sees in the Oberrealschulen and their like – higher primary education – the bulwark of Germany’s modernization process.¹²

Regarding the end of the century, however, there is complete agreement that it had patently become the Technische Hochschulen which supplied much of the scientific and technological knowledge entailed in the continuing growth of industry; and the Technische Hochschulen continued to perform this role until late into the inter-war era. Since 1945, the topography of higher German technical learning has changed relatively little. Today, the Technische Hochschulen still furnish firms in advanced and traditional technology with armies of highly trained engineers. To this cluster of schools must be added a new group – the Technical Universities – which arose in the 1960s. The latter perform the same cognitive and professional functions as the Technische Hochschulen, and they constitute the German university’s strategic reaction to a situation in which it was losing a growing number of talented students. Another cluster of technical institutions arose in the 1960s, the Fachhochschulen.¹³ These schools have taken the place of the former Technische Mittelschulen. They offer an only moderately long cycle of instruction, four years compared to the six or seven years in Technische Hochschulen. The German technical education system continues to be characterized, however, not only by its remarkable heterogeneity but also by the existence of relatively supple boundaries between institutions. It is therefore quite possible for students in the lower-level Fachhochschulen to transfer without penalty either to the higher-status Technische Hochschulen or to a university. In sum, pliable transverse structures underpin heterogeneity, while re-definable hierarchic structures guarantee its perpetuation. The result is that German industry, since the middle of the 19th century, has had an immense diversity of institutions of technical...