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Contents of IMP Journal issue 2, volume 3
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When Science Shall Mean Business. From multifaceted to limited use of science?
Authors
Alexandra Waluszewski
Abstract
Science shall mean business. And if not, a relationship between science and business shall be created. These "commandments" characterise many contemporary agendas; policy as well as university and research management. But what happens with a) the content and use of scientific knowledge resources and b) the use of science in business when the doing of science increasingly is organised into network-like structures including researchers, research management, research financiers, investors and companies? This issue is discussed with the help of two related approaches to business and science; IMP and the STS1 and is illustrated with a short empirical example. The paper is concluded with a discussion concerning if the organising of business and science into network-like structures really breeds an increased commercial use, or if the effect is more or less the opposite: a directed and limited production and use of scientific resources.
Success in Science and Burden in Business. On the Difficult Relationship between Science as a Developing Setting and Business as a Producer-User Setting
Authors
Malena Ingemansson and Alexandra Waluszewski
Abstract
In this paper we will follow a new analytical technology within biotech that is regarded as a radical breakthrough in both science where it was developed and in business where a start-up company based a production on it and became a supplier to commercial users. However, although the different actors involved in developing, producing and using the potential innovation ascribe it great benefits, it never becomes an economic success. The overall research question is simple: why?
The innovation process and its organisational setting - fit or misfit?
Authors
Sofia Wagrell and Alexandra Waluszewski
Abstract
A new microwave based technology for enlarged prostate treatment has been developed that, in contrast to the established surgical method, does not require surgery, anaesthesia and subsequent hospitalisation. The development of this technology and a company supplying it was initiated and encouraged by a hospital belonging to a health care sector that deliberately promoted innovation efforts in order to increase cost-efficiency. Still, when the microwave based technology was ready for use, it was revealed that the health care sector that initiated the innovation journey was equipped with both professional and organisational structures that counteracted this process. It is this innovation process we will explore in this paper. The overall research question concerns the interaction between the innovation process and the organisational setting it emerges within: In what way does the organisational setting a) facilitate and b) hinder the embedding of the potential innovation.
Resource interfaces telling other stories about the commercial use of new technology: The embedding of biotech solutions in US, China and Taiwan
Authors
Alexandra Waluszewski, Enrico Baraldi, Tommy Shih and Åse Linne
Abstract
This study focuses on the embedding of new biotech solutions into three business landscapes - US, China and Taiwan. A "state-of-the-art" chromatography system tuned for operating in the step between laboratory and large-scale production is used as the common point of departure to investigate the supplier-user interfaces involving biotechnology in each of the three countries; the resource interaction in the networks around each machine is mapped. The analysis identifies the influences left on these resource interfaces by the national frameworks of science, policy and business. The results stress the importance of established resource structures to enable use of new technical solutions, the facilitating and restricting role of local path dependency, and the problems faced by policy in breeding network-level interactions sustaining the development and use of biotech solutions.
Keywords: biotech, technology utilisation, embedding, supplier-user interaction, resource interfaces