History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Holger Braun-Thürmann, Andreas Knie, Jörg Potthast, Dagmar Simon
Social Science Research Center Berlin
Scientists' Spin-offs – The Continuation of Research by Other Means?
Spin-off firms stemming from state financed research institutes are worth discussing within science policy studies. These new kinds of enterprises can be seen as an indication of the way in which research is nowadays related and oriented toward business. Spin-offs could play a significant role as institutions bridging the gap between (basic) science and the established industry. Furthermore, spin-offs could serve as a strategy used by researchers to cope with and influence the institutional conditions of their work. Many researchers are founding new ventures in order to pursue their own career or to undertake research that does not go along with the expectations and self-conception of their research institute. Accordingly, we would like to suggest that scientists' spin-offs can serve as an appropriate element in the empirical foundations of debates on issues like the “new production of knowledge”.
Recent literature on the topic are treating spin-off ventures as vehicles for the commercialization of scientific findings. This approach reveals numerous insights into the likelihood and predictors of and impediments to a successful spin-off. Questions regarding the consequences for science, and for the research institutes, if the scientific staff is going to build up a company have seldom been posed to date. Such questions should consider consequences beyond the research institutes’ opportunities for gaining royalties. The objective of our paper is to provide a perspective on spin-offs as nodes within a network of scientific knowledge and value creation. We would like to make a case that a portion of scientists use the spin-off venture for the continuation of research by other – private - means.
Our study (financed by the German Ministry of Science 2004-2007) is based on empirical data encompassing 59 interviews with members of public research institutes and academic spin-off founders. The survey is confined to Germany, but its findings are compared and interpreted with results from other countries. Following a case study approach, we cannot claim representativeness in a statistical sense. We aim, rather, at shedding light on the structures and dynamics of a knowledge production that is distributed among research institutes, spin-offs and the established industry.
In answering the guiding question of the workshop - whether spin-offs could be regarded as a product of organic or policy driven change - we would like to take full account of the complexity of the issue. On the one hand, it is possible to interpret scientists' founding of firms as a consequence of an epistemic transformation characterized by the blurring boundaries between (basic) research and its applications within a few disciplines. On the other hand, politicians in nearly all European nations consider spin-offs as a solution to the problem of mass unemployment. This assessment legitimizes the launch of a policy agenda entailing subsidies to start-up research-entrepreneurs.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006