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Many researchers believe that the modern university is in a state of crisis like never before. One of the main reasons cited for this decline is that the modern university has a closer resemblance to a transnational corporation than to a traditional scholarly institution (Lewis, 2005). This paper attempts to define the term "university" from a classical perspective and to describe the gradual incorporation of vocational pursuits into its scope. Focusing on modern North American university models, it asks whether business schools, in particular, should be operating within academia. An alternative is discussed, which focuses on the vocational attributes of business rather than theoretical knowledge. I draw on secondary sources as well as my own personal experience as a student and researcher to make suggestions on how interdepartmental tension developed and how it can be reduced. The paper finds that the business school does have a place in the modern university; however, the classical representation of the university must be abandoned for it to be fully embraced.

As of late, it would seem that the commonly sought after concept of collaboration has lost its appeal and, arising in its aftermath, is a reconfigured front of conflict between the public and private spheres of American life. In this current attack on the public, the stage is ripe for disobedience in all its various forms and functions to stand up against what privatization advocates have so strategically constructed as COMMONSENSE. This COMMONSENSE has evolved into a seemingly natural state that has captured the allegiance of folks who full-heartedly agree, without substantiated expertise, that systems of commodification and privatization will serve as simple solutions to the failures of society. Without forgetting acts of protest in all its forms and fashions, this paper follows the lead of Howard Zinn and revisits the meaning of disobedience as both an intellectual and political project within a world that for many seems stuck at a moral and ethical impasse. Surely, immediate reactions to human indignity are wholly necessary, but this cannot distract an individual from dismantling the symbolic field that systemically sustains this indignity--that of global capitalism and its discontents.

The purposes of this paper were to undertake a comparative analysis of policy shifts in England and the United States of America relating to school type diversification and corporatization, and the implications for educational leader preparation programs. Whilst the school delivery landscape seems to be one of turbulence, over the last four decades there has been a consistent drive in both countries for school-type diversification due to bi-partisan consensus regarding the appropriateness of neoliberal solutions to the problem of raising educational standards. This study involves an intellectual mapping of education provision in England and the United States of America, drawing on a range of primary and secondary data sources, including policy speeches, and for the latter, scholars' interpretations of these. The documents were located initially through keyword searches of databases, archival material and legislation, and subsequently through following up references.

VET (vocational education and training) is a highly complex, multidimensional worldwide phenomenon with diverse structures. Additionally, very different actors define the functions of a national (or even a regional) VET system. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the policy frameworks and current states of such systems. Therefore, we focus on selected VET systems in order to understand their specifics and thus, their market conditions. A qualitative approach is used to answer the research question regarding which conditions create or support market-based opportunities for the provision of commercial vocational training services. We find that the liberalism and deregulation of the VET sectors, as well as the marketisation of VET practices, lead to incentives to internationalise VET offers. Thinking in terms of skills, the kind of education system does not play a role. This is the case in liberal market-driven VET approaches (here, the UK, the USA and Australia) and is mirrored in the micro-analysis categories of "curricula," "learning location," "content," and "learning process."

The world is marked by the twin processes of economic and cultural globalization in an era of information technology. The identities of all societies are evolving as social and political boundaries are shrinking day-by-day. As a result of significant economic and political changes, cross-cultural contact is at an all-time high in human history. Over the past three decades, however, significant social, political and technological changes appear to have seriously revamped policies, set new paradigms, and shifted philosophies that contribute to the dramatic alteration of the educational landscape. This globalized world is controlled by a triple deity--money, markets, and media--that have seamlessly entrenched themselves in how "education is imparted" around the globe. This infiltration has affected practices, practitioners, and programs. This paper presents the changing landscape of higher education in the global market, in terms of opportunities and threats to higher education institutes and universities around the world.

Censorship, says Australian political theorist John Keane (1991), can "echo within us, take up residence within ourselves, spying on us, a private amanuensis who reminds us never to go too far... It makes us zip our lips, tremble and think twice" (p. 39). It can also make us sick. The author states that this is her argument here: that, in the context of higher education, the demands made on academics by the commercial-in-confidence university, particularly for censorship of self and others, are detrimental to their health and wellbeing.

Various institutions such as universities and corporations strive to commercialize technologies produced through R&D investment. The ideal way to commercialize technology is to transfer it, recognizing the value of the developed technology. Technology transfer is the transfer of technology from R&D entities, such as universities, research institutes, and companies, to others, with the advantage of spreading research results and maximizing cost efficiency. In other words, if enough technology is transferred, it can be commercialized. Although many institutions have various support measures to assist in transferring technology, there is no substitution for quantitative, objective methods. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a technology transfer prediction model based on the information found in patents. However, it is not realistic to include the information from all patents in the quantitative, objective method, so patterns related to technology transfer must be identified to select the appropriate patents that can be used in the predictive model. In addition, a method is needed to address the insufficient training data for the model. Training data are limited because some technology transfer information is not disclosed, and there is little technology transferred in new technology fields. The technology transfer prediction model proposed in this paper searches for hidden patterns related to technology transfer by imaging the patent information, which can also be applied to image analysis models. Furthermore, augmenting the data can solve the problem of the lack of learning data for technology transfer. To examine whether the proposed model can be used in real industries, we collected patents related to artificial intelligence technology registered in the United States and conducted experiments. The experimental results show that the models trained by imaging patent information performed excellently. Moreover, it was shown that the data augmentation technique can be used when there are insufficient data for technology transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of open-access (OA) academic publishing, the mounting pressure cross global academe to publish or perish has spawned an exponentially growing number of dodgy academic e-journals charging high fees to authors, often US$300-650, and even triple that amount, promising super-fast processing and publication open-access (OA) online. Jeffrey Beall (Scholarly Open Access, http://scholarlyoa.com) has characterized this phenomenon as "predatory OA publishing," since it is oriented largely to extorting a high fee from authors. This exponential growth in start-up cyber-journals galore of questionable quality and dubious upstart origin is driven largely by the globalization of Euro-Atlantic research cultures into the Global South and lower-income economies everywhere, part of the now rapid internationalization of scientific research (Jha 2011) and "researching under the audit" (Illner 2011: 70), and is potentially a form of "academic racketeering." It tends to attract and exploit lesser-privileged academics, often on "knowledge production peripheries." They are a segment of a hugely expanding global constellation of researchers, in some ways a "research proletariat" (Harvie 2000), many of whom can can least afford the "cyber-services" of these start-up, fee-gouging OA journals. Yet researchers anywhere, including doctoral students and others in an "academic precariat," may be lured to publish there, given a turnaround time of three weeks from submission to acceptance and publication often offered and implemented (Stratford 2012). A certain kind of "market cynicism" (Power 2010) may take hold, where young academics are forced to think of themselves largely in economic terms and the "price" of quick dubious publication. In essential ways, the phenomenon of predatory academic journals is also part of the largely ex-colonial and subalternized "academic periphery striking back" against that Eurodominance of research cultures, involving basic contestations about asymmetrical power and representation and the geopolitics of hegemonic and subaltern knowledge production and dissemination on a global scale, the "coloniality of power/knowledge" (Quijano 2000; Grosvoguel 2008; Jaramillo 2012) within the changing face of biopolitical production and the emergence of a new "common" (Hardt 2010; Hardt & Negri 2009) inside globalized immaterial capitalist production. Racist subtexts about "academic scams based in Africa and South Asia" need to be confronted and avoided. In resisting trends toward corporate, high-cost Western-dominated academic publication, cost-free OA knowledge publication paradigms need to be expanded in the (re)appropriation of a "knowledge commons" under late capitalism. These include arXiv.org, journals like JCEPS, the Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Qualitative Social Research (bit.ly/xjc0mD), and more than 7,000 others associated with the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) -- in the spirit of the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics (bit.ly/zPYYFJ) and the work of the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca), Open Journal Systems (tinyurl.com/2ydklr), SciELO (http://socialsciences.scielo.org/) in Latin America--and other initiatives for "Green OA" in open-access repositories elsewhere. These OA needs to be reconceived in the struggle for a "communism of the common" (Hardt 2010: 140). That re appropriation and its self-organization should become a main goal in confronting and dismantling the regime of monopolistic knowledge control today by giant "knowledge enclosure" corporations like Thomson-Reuters, Springer and Wiley. A key aim of the present paper is to spotlight these "predatory" journals and urge further empirical research. Despite the huge amount of largely bourgeois analysis of OA, there is very scant critical inquiry into such academic journals and their burgeoning conglomerates.

In recent years universities have been taken by a new wave of entrepreneurial activities. Originally universities engaged with entrepreneurship mostly in terms of commercializing innovations based on research in the sciences. The new initiatives are instead focused on students and recent alumni, and encompass a much wider set of entrepreneurial initiatives, including student work spaces, accelerators programmes, or industry partnerships. This paper examines these emergent entrepreneurial activities in and around universities, and then asks what the role of government policy is. It argues that any policy approach will have to understand the multi-faceted nature of these new initiatives, and be sensitive to the porous nature of the boundaries between university and private-sector activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US universities are leading the way in technology commercialization, while universities in Russia lag far behind. This paper discusses the best American practices, as well as the main issues of technology commercialization at the US universities. As an example, we consider the experience of the University of Maryland, College Park. In the next section, we turn to technology commercialization in Russia, where it struggles for several reasons. In this paper, we propose that Russia can improve its technology commercialization by studying the example of the leading US entrepreneurial universities and implementing proper procedures. And the important overarching point is that Russian universities need to improve their collaboration with industry, and they need to develop new standards of administrative, research, and business activity that will promote innovation and entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, universities have seen an increasing amount of activity in entrepreneurship and commercialization, not only for students, but for faculty as well. Traditionally, these initiatives have been separate, such that programs and curriculum have been focused on supporting just students or just faculty. In 2012, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the NSF I-Corps™ program, an innovative funding program that not only offered principle investigators (PIs) funding, but also exposed PIs to an innovation/entrepreneurship curriculum as well. The University of Michigan (U-M) was one of the first two NSF I-Corps™ Nodes funded in 2012 and has leveraged the program to catalyze the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This paper describes the growth of this entrepreneurial ecosystem since 1983, the call of entrepreneurship in the U-M College of Engineering and describes the role the U-M NSF I-Corps™ program has played across the university. The paper concludes with lessons learned and recommendations to administrators and policy makers considering more active promotion of academic entrepreneurship and commercialization in universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the concept of public values can be operationalized in an ongoing public initiative to stimulate innovation in an emerging technology. Our study focuses on Innovation Corps (I-Corps)-a program initiated in 2011 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to accelerate the process of commercializing science-driven discoveries. The I-Corps method has since spread rapidly across multiple US agencies. Separately, there has also been heightened attention to the early anticipation and mitigation of the implications of emerging science and technology. Drawing on the case of nanotechnology, the paper considers how public values related to nanotechnology commercialization can be integrated alongside the fast start-up procedures embedded in I-Corps. We use a public values framework to pose societal impact questions that can be probed in parallel with the current I-Corps process, highlighting values such as identification of societal problems that the technology might potentially address; types of potential customers likely to be overlooked; groups who might oppose the application as well as those who might support it; and potential environmental, health, and safety risks. The paper discusses the challenges of adding specifications related to equity as well as safety in efforts to foster rapid commercialization and considers how these can be integrated within the I-Corps approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign-born academic scientists have been consistently shown to be more productive than the native-born in the United States with regard to research and patents. However, no study has yet analyzed whether the foreign-born are also more likely to commercialize their research after having it patented. This paper utilizes a 2010 survey of academic inventors to analyze whether a selected patent had been licensed or whether technology transfer offices were currently working with a company. Additional analysis was conducted to understand where patents were held (whether by a private company, spinoff, government, or university) for those patents that had been successfully licensed in the past. Findings show that the foreign-born are generally less likely to have their patents licensed or to be working with technology transfer offices, though the significance of the results are mixed. In addition, the foreign-born are more likely to have their licenses held by private companies, while the native-born are more likely to work with spinoffs. These results indicate that technology transfer offices can better serve a key part of the academic workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the progress of initiatives promoting open access publishing of scientific research papers, noting that although the numbers of available open-access articles and journals have increased between 1993 and 2012, they represent a very small percentage of the total scientific literature. Open access policies have been adopted by institutions such as the European Union Horizon 2020 research program, the Australian Research Council, and the World Bank. The open access journal PLOS ONE has also been successful in publishing notable peer-reviewed research. Other topics include U.S. government agency policies regarding open access, the launch of online open-access journals such as "eLife," and efforts to commercialize open access publishing.

Discussions of farm labor emphasize that much hired labor is of a low opportunity cost, "salvage" nature and that technological advance is reducing the need for labor in agriculture. However, these ideas do not explain a trend for an increasing proportion of hired farm workers to be employed for a longer duration or for family labor to decline at a more rapid rate than hired labor. This paper proposes that these trends can be explained by the technical and commercial development, or rationalization, of United States agriculture in line with goals of organizing resources to create a profitable set of commodities with manageable risk. The analysis has several empirical implications that are borne out by national-level relationships of trends in numbers of hired and family farm workers with technical change, commercialization, and unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the trajectories of the development and institutionalization of technology transfer structures and activities in Israel and Japan, two countries with strong science and technology sectors, from the 1950s to the present. We examine the local arrangements that existed before the introduction of the U.S. model in the 1980s and 90s, and how the Japanese and Israeli schemes of technology transfer evolved under the combination of local practices and U.S. influence. Drawing on new institutional theory's concept of loose coupling, we identify different types of loose coupling between formal structures and practices in Israeli and Japanese fields of technology transfer before and after the introduction of U.S. model. Our analysis show that the new configurations in the two countries are best analyzed by looking at two factors: (1) The perceived efficacy of the local, previous technology transfer arrangements, and; (2) the gap between the local arrangement and the U.S. technology transfer model. In the Israeli case, the former technology transfer model was similar to the one in the U.S.—however, it was perceived as potentially ineffective and thus disputable. In the Japanese case, the former technology transfer model was seen as effective and largely uncontested. The introduction of the U.S. formal model with the university ownership of patents disrupted the informal technology transfer mechanisms in Japan. These historical trajectories explain why, on one hand, Israeli science community was quick to adopt to the U.S. model but contested its efficacy and legitimacy, and on the other hand, the Japanese science community modified the U.S. model through negotiating conditions that were as favorable to firms than universities as their previous mode of technology transfer. Through these cases, we show how loose coupling in each field developed and changed in response to global and local policies. We argue that attention to the local dynamics of loose coupling can help explain local variations in the global diffusion of the American style of technology transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many scholars researching the commercialization of science focus on biomedicine, this paper explores the changing commercial frameworks for meteorology in the UK and the US. The organization of meteorology in both countries increasingly reflects a political-economic approach that treats science as an economic entity in which market-based criteria can be used to allocate scientific resources. The differences are equally significant in terms of the production and dissemination of meteorological forecasts and other data to public and private services. Alongside this commercialization has been the emergence of weather derivatives markets -- financial products that enable trading on weather indices in a way similar to oil or gas futures -- which have re-shaped how some businesses interact with meteorologists. This paper explores how weather derivatives traders engage with, shape, and are frustrated by a commercialized approach to funding meteorological data and forecasts. It highlights how commercial imperatives raise questions about the collection and quality of meteorological data, and how forecasting and weather modelling is being adopted within the private sector to enable trading strategies in the weather derivatives market. The consequences for commercial actors are highly variable, suggesting that any account of commercialization of science, while recognizing extant policy shifts, must be sufficiently nuanced in its interpretation of such effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A main implication of C.E. Ayres tool-combination principle is that the goal of technical progress is best served by a non-proprietary, open science public policy. Joseph Schumpeter claimed that new combinations are consequential only when they have been successfully commercialized. The capacity to privatize knowledge is, moreover, a powerful stimulus to innovation. This paper reexamines the Ayresian and Schumpeterian positions using evidence from the Bayh Dole experiment. The Bayh Dole Act, which gave universities title to inventions resulting from federally-sponsored research, created a laboratory wherein the trade-offs between diminution of the appropriable knowledge fund (due to patenting) and incentives to commercialization can be appraised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies and compares the actual historic solar photovoltaic (PV) installation data in Japan and the United States and proposes two deployment models to account for the differences. Deployment, along with research, development and demonstration, constitutes what is known as the RD3 (PCAST — President's Council of Advances in Science and Technology, United States) innovative chain of a new technology. Japan deploys PV focusing on the niche of utility grid-tied small-scale system (90 per cent of which is standardised roof-top residential PV system) using highly integrated value chain; this seems to draw upon her strong manufacturing culture and associated social technology and institutions for suppliers-dominated innovations. The United States deploys PV as a broadly defined innovation emphasising user-oriented customisation in both on and off grid, residential and industrial applications using small independent and intermediary system integrators. Empirical analysis of the diffusion patterns in the grid-tied small system category in respective contexts suggests that Japan's institutions seem to match her mass deployment strategy while the United States' combination of fragmented industry structure and diversity deployment gives rise to a complex diffusion pattern calling for continual institutional innovation or co-evolution. Our research, therefore, highlights that commercialisation of new technology or technical change, in general, is not an autonomous process and has strong institutional underpinnings. We formalise and generalise this "match" (Perez, 1983) argument in accordance with Nelson and Sampat's (2001) framework of physical technology vs social technology and their interactions. Some potential future extensions regarding utilities for this model are then highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the possible impact of venture capital (VC) backing on the commercialization direction of technology-based start-ups by asking: To what extent (if at all) do VC-funded start-ups engage in cooperative commercialization strategies (strategic alliances or technology licensing, or both) relative to a comparable set of start-ups, and with what consequences? To address these questions, I assemble a novel data set that matches firms receiving a federal research and development subsidy through the U.S. Small Business Innovative Research program to VC-funded firms by observable characteristics in five technology-intensive industries. These data allow decoupling of cooperative activity resulting from start-up development via the passage of calendar time from that due to association with VCs. An analysis of the 696 start-ups in the sample (split by an external funding source) suggests substantial boosts in both cooperative activity associated with VC-backed firms and in the likelihood of an initial public offering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American universities are experimenting with new mechanisms for promoting the commercialization of academic research and generating revenue from university intellectual property. This paper discusses mechanisms available to universities in managing the commercialization of intellectual property, considering equity as a technology transfer mechanism that offers advantages for both generating revenue and aligning the interests of universities, industry and faculty. Employing data from a national survey of Carnegie I and Carnegie II institutions, we document the recent rise in university equity holdings. We present and estimate a model that considers the university's use of equity to be a function of behavioral factors related to the university's prior experiences with licensing, success relative to other institutions, and the organization of the technology transfer office, as well as structural characteristics related to university type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises two questions. Do donors to nonprofit organizations care about whether nonprofit organizations pursue commercial activities? Do donors more approve commercial activities that are related to or advance the mission of a nonprofit organization than those commercial activities that do not? The paper uses data collected from donors and volunteers with one human services nonprofit organization in the United States. The principal conclusions are two. Most donors and volunteers have little interest in the sources of nonprofit organizations' funds. Among the relatively small percentage of donors and volunteers who attend to use of commercial activities, the use of activities that are consistent with or advance the organization's mission is approved, and the use of commercial activities that do not advance the mission is relatively disapproved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewable jet fuel (RJF) production has been recognized as a promising approach for reducing the aviation sector's carbon footprint. Over the last decade, the commercial production of RJF has piqued the interest of airlines and governments around the world. However, RJF production can be challenging due to its dispersed supply resources. Furthermore, the production of RJF is more costly compared to producing conventional jet fuel. In this study, using a mixed integer linear programming (MILP), we design a corn-stover-based RJF supply chain network in which we obtain an optimized configuration of the supply chain and determine operational decisions required to meet RJF demand at airports. To accelerate the commercialization of RJF production, we examined four incentive programs designed to cover the supply chain's costs, with agricultural statistics districts serving as the designated supply regions. This study is validated by employing the model to design the supply chain in the Midwestern United States. The results from this study are promising as they show the supply chain can achieve commercialization with partial financial coverage from the incentive programs. Based on the findings of this study, policymakers can devise policies to commercialize RJF production and accelerate its adoption by the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Proof of Concept phase in university technology transfer is considered to be critical for the success of both licensing and the creation of spin-off companies. In the United States, Proof of Concept Centers are emerging as successful structures to address the challenges of this phase. In this paper, we present a framework to assess the role for such a structure in a university ecosystem. The framework is built from previous references that we use to explicitly link the features of Proof of Concept Centers with the challenges of the Proof of Concept phase, and establish their specific contributions to the overall technology commercialization efforts of a university. We illustrate the application of this framework in a case study of the University of Coimbra, in Portugal, and develop a characterization that is representative of the role that a Proof of Concept Center can play in comparable university ecosystems that feature conventional technology commercialization structures, and struggle with the challenges of the Proof of Concept phase. Our study suggests that there is in fact a possible role for a Proof of Concept Center in the regional ecosystem of the University of Coimbra, with a potentially very relevant impact in the technology commercialization process, through networking outside academia and research environments, funding of Proof of Concept activities, and technology entrepreneurship education for the development of entrepreneurial skills for researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: During the last decade, countries around the world - especially the U.S., Brazil, and many in Europe - have worked to accelerate the commercialization of a biofuel industry. As pilot plant studies for the second-generation biofuel (e.g., cellulosic biofuel) currently seek to determine the most viable feedstocks and processing technologies, it is an opportune time to formulate operations research (OR) models of the biofuel supply chain (SC) so they might be used to implement the technologies that prove to be most promising. This paper provides a literature review of research on the biofuel SC. It classifies prior research according to decision time frame (i.e., strategic, tactical, operational, and integrated) as well as level in the supply chain (i.e., upstream, midstream, and downstream). In addition, it reviews related research on agri-products, which have some commonalities relative to harvesting and perishability; petroleum-based fuels, which have some commonalities related to distribution (some biofuels can be mixed with gasoline but others cannot); and generic supply chains, which provide some applicable modeling structures. Finally, this paper emphasizes unique needs to support decisions that integrate the farm with commercial levels (e.g., storage, pre-processing, refining, and distribution) and identifies fertile avenues for future research on the biofuel supply chain. OR models are needed to help assure the economic viability of the biofuel industry. They can be used by growers, processors, and distributors to design and manage an integrated system and by government to inform policies needed to stimulate the growth of the industry and, perhaps, subsidize it. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper we describe intervention science as it applies to psychosocial behavioral health interventions and its effects on the growing evidence assessment infrastructure. In the process we discuss parallels with intervention science in industry and physical healthcare. Emerging government policies in the United States, such as Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices, create opportunities for increased commercialization of intervention development and dissemination a trend that contains both opportunities and risks for the field. The opportunities are to improve behavioral health care by devoting resources to rapidly identifying safe and effective interventions and translating these into routine clinical practice. The risks include biased research, limited ranges of services, and higher costs for providers. We also describe methods and mechanisms for controlling risks and promoting improvements, including but not limited to international coordination and cooperation (harmonization). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationship between technology licensing and the effectiveness of patent protection. Using the 1994 Carnegie Mellon survey on industrial research and development (R&D) in the United States, we develop and test a simple structural model in which the patenting and licensing decisions are jointly determined. We find that increases in the effectiveness of patent protection increases licensing propensity, but only when the firm lacks specialized complementary assets required to commercialize new technologies. In contrast, for firms with specialized complementary assets, increases in patent effectiveness increase patenting propensity but reduce the propensity to license. We present systematic cross-industry empirical support for the proposition that intellectual property protection is a key determinant of the vertical boundaries of the firm and the market for technology but that its impact is mediated by a firm's ownership of specialized complementary assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The built forms of New York City and Boston differed dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper focuses on the changing forms of their retail districts and evaluates the divergence in those patterns in relation to their socioeconomic context. Historical atlases and city directories identified the locations of department stores, which were used as indicators of the retail districts while primary and secondary historical sources related locational decisions to their economic position and the structure of their elite classes. New York's unstable elite classes continued to move their residences north on Manhattan Island throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and were unable and unwilling to stop the northward expansion of the retail district. Boston's stable ruling class was able to control retail expansion through various political acts limiting development and through social barriers that limited displays of conspicuous consumption. The importance of the structure of elite classes in mediating the processes of land allocation suggests that findings of New York, as a city of competitive capitalism with a splintered elite, and Boston, as a city of controlled capitalism with a ruling elite, might provide a useful framework for understanding the specific contexts within other urban built forms.

Abstract: To stimulate the commercial space transportation industry, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is facilitating the demonstration of Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) by private-sector companies. In 2006, NASA entered into funded agreements with two such companies to share NASA''s $500 million investment, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Rocketplane Kistler (RpK), each of which proposed to obtain the additional private financing needed to complete its flight demonstrations. In 2007, NASA terminated the agreement with RpK because it failed to meet a series of technical and financial milestones which were necessary to receive the incremental NASA payments. In 2008, NASA conducted another competition for the remaining $170 million of NASA funding and entered into a funded agreement with Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC). This paper provides an overview of the COTS approach of SpaceX and OSC and the status of their efforts to develop reliable and cost-effective commercial transportation to serve the LEO marketplace. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The recent increase in the rate of commercialization of intellectual property at US and European universities has important performance and policy implications. We review recent studies of the antecedents and consequences of these activities and then draw some lessons learned for policy-makers. A key conclusion is that universities and regions must formulate and implement coherent and feasible technology transfer/commercialization strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hemp production has been nonexistent in the United States since the 1950s. However, low prices for traditional crops have peeked interest in commercial hemp production. The current literature on hemp suggests that it may compete on the margin with traditional crops, but is not likely to generate sizeable profits. Hemp appears slightly more profitable than traditional row crops, but less profitable than other specialty crops. An important constraint to a viable commercial hemp industry is the current state of harvesting and processing technologies, which are quite labor intensive, and result in relatively high per unit costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to increase the commercialization of basic research, policy makers have tried to foster closer ties between university research and industry R&D. To empirically test whether there is a link between commercialization and university research, this paper models firm startups during 1976-78 for six 2-digit manufacturing industries located in 25 metropolitan areas The findings are mixed the relationship between university research and firm births in the electrical and electronic equipment industries (SIC 36) is positive and statistically significant, while in the instruments and related industries (SIC 38) the relationship is statistically insignificant

Although the commercialization of public-sector technology is a primary federal strategy for improving the international competitiveness of U.S. industry, the potential role of spin-off entrepreneurship in this strategy is poorly understood. Inventors from three large national laboratories are compared to each other and to spin-off entrepreneurs from the same laboratories. A 1992 survey gathered data on personal characteristics, attitudes, and perceptions of situational variables from 213 inventors and 24 spin-off entrepreneurs. This paper identifies differences among the laboratories as well as differences between each of the laboratories and the entrepreneurs that have started ventures from Inventions discovered at these laboratories. These differences should be used to identify areas of change that are needed to increase the number of inventions that are spun-off from the laboratories. These changes include affecting the inventors' entrepreneurial attitudes and perceptions of key situational variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US has recently—and belatedly—come to recognize opioid addiction as a public health crisis. What has gone mostly unrecognized is the degree to which this crisis is intertwined with US intellectual property law and related elements of US innovation policy. Innovation institutions—the legal arrangements that structure incentives for production and allocation of knowledge goods—encouraged the development and commercialization of addictive painkillers, restricted access to opioid antidotes, and (perhaps most importantly) failed to facilitate investments in alternative, nonaddictive treatments for chronic pain. Although innovation policy does not bear all the blame for the opioid wave that has washed over communities across the country, innovation institutions are bound up in the ongoing epidemic to a degree that so far has gone underappreciated. This article examines the proliferation of opioid use and abuse through the lens of innovation policy, and it envisions ways in which innovation institutions could help to contain the crisis. Along the way, it seeks to derive broader lessons for innovation policy scholarship as well as recommendations for institutional reform. The opioid crisis challenges the conventional understanding of IP law as a trade-off between allocative efficiency and dynamic efficiency; it highlights the potentially pernicious role of IP protection for addictive and habit-forming products; and it exposes deep flaws in the structure of federal subsidies for and regulation of prescription drugs. It also draws attention to the political and cultural factors that contribute to innovation policy failures. Ultimately, the opioid crisis underscores both the urgency and the limits of institutional change in the innovation policy domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at efforts made to promote science entrepreneurship in the U.S., Japan, Great Britain, and Germany. It is noted that the commercialization of scientific knowledge in the U.S. developed from a "bottom-up" phenomenon of university-based technology start-ups. Most industrialized countries have not surpassed the U.S. in science entrepreneurship because of the way in which scientists' occupational identity is defined in market economies. The science policies of Germany and Japan are discussed in relation to biotechnology research and development in the U.S. and Great Britain. The author believes that academic scientists in the U.S. have a competitive advantage as a result of the speed and effort required to work in their highly competitive environments.

In this review, we present genetically modified (GM) horticultural events that have passed the regulatory process and have been approved for cultivation or food use in different countries. The first authorization or deregulation of a GM horticultural plant issued 25 years ago initiated a fast expansion of GM organisms (GMO) engineered by using gene transfer technology. The list of GM horticultural species comprises representatives of vegetables, fruit plants and ornamentals. We describe their unique characteristics, often not achievable by conventional breeding, and how they were developed, and the approval process. Information on the adoption of GM horticultural cultivars and sale is accessed if commercialization has occurred. The review comprises, among others, Flavr SavrTM and other tomato cultivars with delayed ripening and improved shelf-life, insect-resistant eggplant (or brinjal), as well as virus-resistant squash, melon and the common bean, and also fruit trees, plum and papaya. Cultivation of the latter was particularly valuable to farmers in Hawaii as it ensured restoration of papaya production devastated earlier by the Papaya ringspot virus (PRSV). In contrast, a plum resistant to sharka (Plum pox virus; PPV) deregulated in the USA is still awaiting commercialization. GM events with improved quality include the recently marketed non-browning apple and high-lycopene pineapple. We also present orange petunia, blue 'Applause' rose and Moon-series carnations with a modified purple and violet flower colour. Finally, we discuss prospects of GM horticultural plants, including their development using promising new breeding technologies relying on genome editing and considered as an alternative to the transgenic approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the evolution of biopharmaceutical firms as they bore great uncertainty and risks in their endeavours to commercialise new therapies – through the regenerative medicine industry in the United States, Britain and Japan. Despite its beginnings in the 1970s, regenerative medicines have yet to become a widely accepted form of medicine. A large part of the problem lay with the lack of 'fit' with the broader health context. This article illustrates how the trajectory of the sector was shaped, not only by the nature of the technology, but also by the complex contexts in which firms were embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authors with many theoretical and managerial perspectives argue that businesses commercializing technologically complex goods benefit when they collaborate closely with other businesses. Collaboration is viewed as a means for businesses to overcome competency limitations and to achieve the close configuration of components required for complex goods. We predict that collaborative relationships often assist businesses to produce complex goods, but that the relationships might also cause problems for the collaborating businesses. We find that firms using development-oriented and marketing-oriented collaborative relationships in the hospital software systems industry are less likely to shut down than businesses that follow independent approaches when the environment changes gradually, but businesses using collaborative relationships are .sometimes susceptible to being acquired by other firms. Following a sudden environmental shock, businesses with collaborative relationships for activities central to the shock became more likely to shut down, while businesses with collaborative relationships for activities outside the focus of the shock became more likely to survive. The .study critically evaluates and tests the widely stated but little-tested argument that interfirm collaboration is usually beneficial. The results address the issue of whether organizational choices affect comparative business performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on research and development policy in the United States, which supplies private industry and the public with information about technical advances that have commercial applications. Agencies involved in the spin-off function include: Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information; Technology Utilization Program at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency; Department of Defense; Atomic Energy Commission; Smithsonian Institution; and Library of Congress. Three categories of spin-offs, advice for finding research reports on useful spinoffs, and the State Technical Services Act (HR 3420) are mentioned. An appendix lists spin-offs in the construction, electronics, chemical, and metal-working industries.