The introduction of a sonar system for fisheries by the Norwegian firm Simrad had lasting effects on the industry, as the system was based on digital mastery that could be utilized for other products. Norwegian engineers with sonar experience were the driving force behind this breakthrough, demonstrating the relevance of theories of national agglomerations of competence. In one important though unintended outcome, internal failures forced the company to hire new people who adopted creative strategies to meet the competitive situation presented by Japan.

From the late 1890s through the 1920s, a new set of nonprofit, business-funded organizations spearheaded an American campaign against commercial duplicity. These new organizations shaped the legal terrain of fraud, built massive public-education campaigns, and created a private law-enforcement capacity to rival that of the federal government. Largely born out of a desire among business elites to fend off proposals for extensive regulatory oversight of commercial speech, the antifraud crusade grew into a social movement that was influenced by prevailing ideas about social hygiene and emerging techniques of private governance. This initiative highlighted some enduring strengths of business self-regulation, such as agility in responding to regulatory problems; it also revealed a key weakness, which was the tendency to overlook deceptive marketing when practiced by firms that were members of the business establishment.

The Selfridge Collection of Medici manuscripts at Harvard Business School's Baker Library is the largest collection of Renaissance Florentine account books outside Italy. This collection documents both the business and personal economic activities of one branch of the Medici family through six generations, extending from the early fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth century. It would be difficult to find, even in Florence, another family whose economic activities are so well documented over such a long span of time, a period we know as the Renaissance. This patrimony of family documents was sold by the Medici heirs through an auction at Christie's of London in 1918; and in 1927 the buyer, H. Gordon Selfridge, deposited the ledgers at the Harvard School of Business Administration. Around one hundred ledgers arrived at Harvard at that time, but one item in the Christie's inventory was missing. In 2007, I found this missing item in the catalogue of a Munich antiquarian book dealer, but it had already been sold to a private collector in Germany. When informed of its importance for the Harvard collection, the new owner of the ledger kindly permitted Laura Linard, director of Historical Collections at Baker Library, to have it microfilmed; and so finally, after eighty years, the missing item has returned, at least in a photographic version, to its original home, thereby completing the Selfridge Collection. This event could be the occasion for a reevaluation of a major collection of business documents too long ignored by historians.