Innovation and universities' role in commercializing research results: should Europe be imitating America's Bahy–Dole experiment?

Introduction

To address the complex issue of the evolving role of universities in technological innovation poses a challenge of truly daunting proportions, especially in a brief presentation such as this. The institutional history of the university is one that is marked by both remarkable continuities and innovations in response to shifting societal expectations and pressures, in the course of which there has been a cumulative broadening of the “missions” that these academic organizations have embraced. Reflecting on this process unavoidably raises questions about the degree to which new roles for the university are compatible with the performance of historical functions, and whether, when there are tensions and conflicts the ancient should yield to the imperatives of the modern. My intention is to address this generic problem of institutional adaptation and survival as it manifests itself today in a role the Europe's universities are being asked to take in the development and commercialization of faculty research as a basis for industrial renewal and economic growth.

Most readers of this chapter will readily appreciate that the relationship between fundamental advances in scientific understanding and technological innovation is complicated and multivalent, and uncertain. It involves the structure economic and organizational incentives for discovery and invention, entrepreneurship and finance, and for the formation of managerial expertise and workforce skills, and the diffusion of new processes and products. It is characterized by a multiplicity of expectational effects and dynamic feedbacks that interconnect all of the foregoing processes.