OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Minority faculty have inequitable access to information, professional development, and research resources. A structured research-mentoring program could help strengthen the research acumen of underrepresented (UR) faculty, provide a community, and support to ensure their success in becoming independent investigators. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The Translational Research Institute (TRI) STARs program aims to build a peer support community of UR in biomedical, clinical, behavioral and social sciences to support career development and research success. The program provides a structured peer support group with a 3-month grant training and development program and addresses issues of isolation often felt by UR faculty in academic settings. It encourages the development of innovative research ideas in a safe environment. This peer support group can also help improve confidence and self-efficacy in clinical and translational research development and execution by UR faculty. At the didactic program’s conclusion and seed grant application submission, STARs provides $10,000 as a TRI DEI Equity, Diversity, and Grantsmanship Expertise project. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Since its launch in 2021, 11 scholars have enrolled in the program;three have fully completed the program, and all three have received subsequent grant funding. Four scholars have completed the didactic program and are in the process of using seed funding to collect initial data and working on initial publications. The remaining scholars are currently in the didactic program. Initial scholar satisfaction with the program is high: 100% reported satisfaction with their participation (Very Satisfied/Satisfied), and 100% agree the program provides adequate support to their research project (Strongly Agree/Agree). Overall, scholars reported an average increase in confidence of 7.9% in grantsmanship skills (Scale 0-10). The return on investment is 3106%, with over $1.9 million in subsequent funding. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Research shows diverse teams working together, capitalizing on innovative ideas, and distinct perspectives outperform homogenous teams. Our preliminary experience demonstrates success for the model. Additional, long-term support will be furthered developed to address additional challenges experienced by UR faculty across their careers.

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: The goal of the CTSA consortium is to move scientific discoveries to clinical application. Translational science (TS) focuses on the process by which this happens, and NCATS supports pilot projects that propose TS questions. We are developing a rubric to guide program managers’ability to discriminate between TS and translational research (TR). METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The CTSA External Review Exchange Consortium (CEREC) and CEREC II are reciprocal review collaborations between CTSA hubs that identify reviewers for each other’s pilot grant applications. CEREC and CEREC II partners developed a 31-item rubric, based on NIH’s Translational Science Principles, for discriminating pilot TS grant applications from those proposing TR. The hubs contributed proposals pre-selected as either TS or TR projects. Then, experienced reviewers and/or program administrators from the hubs used the rubric to score each of the proposals. Reliability of the rubric will be assessed using inter-rater reliability (% agreement and kappa). To identify which of the items in the rubric best discriminate between TS and TR, Item Response Theory analysis will be employed. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Ten CEREC participating hubs submitted 30 applications: 20 TS proposals and 10 TR proposals. Twenty-two reviewers from 12 CEREC hubs evaluated the applications by using the scoring rubric; at least two reviewers evaluated each proposal. The results of the analyses will describe the reliability of the rubric and identify which of the seven TS Principles are most useful for distinguishing between TS and TR pilot grant proposals. Ultimately, this work will yield a scoring rubric that will be disseminated throughout the CTSA network to facilitate the screening of TS applications. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Optimizing research processes is critical to ensure that scientific discoveries are integrated into clinical practice and public health policy as rapidly, efficiently, and equitably as possible. By appropriately identifying and funding TS projects, CTSA hubs can accelerate the impact of clinical and translational research.

Trademark theory implicitly assumes that laws favoring the interests of the producer will inevitably serve the interests of the consumer. Such a claim justifies the way that trademark law privileges the voice of the producer in the marketplace. Historical work has tended to endorse this view, explaining the development of trademarks and trademark law in terms of the information needed for consumers in the modern marketplace. Taking both a historical and “informational” perspective, this essay argues that the producer’s and the consumer’s interests do not so easily align. It speculates that a less varnished history of the mark shows more of a struggle between producers, who seek to have their voice heard without dissent, and consumers, who often want to find alternative yet informed voices to endorse or qualify the information provided by the mark. This alternative view would help explain why, as the paper seeks to show, despite conventional evolutionary narratives, the history of trademarking in the United States is in fact far from linear.

Once described as “neglected,” brands and brand history have benefited from a recent surge of work in business history, economics, and management studies. This research, however, remains relatively tightly focused. Most attention is given to successful, long-lived brands and to the entrepreneurs who developed them. As in the market, so in research, the attraction of successful brands is understandable. Nevertheless, such a focus only reinforces both the well-known tendency to read history through the eyes of the winners and the assumption that losers and also-rans have nothing to tell us. The authors of the articles in this special section share both the wish to look beyond such assumptions and the belief that one way to do so is by complementing the study of brands with the study of trademarks and of the related legal, economic, and business arrangements that stand behind brands and provide context for their development since the nineteenth century.

The introduction of collective and certification marks to U.S. law in 1946 by the Lanham Act has generally been regarded as an innovative and forward-looking step. Yet these marks had been widely used by individual states since the previous century, and international conventions had long been pushing the federal government to enact measures to protect them. Indeed, it may be stranger that the U.S. trademark law of 1905 did not include protection for such marks than that, forty years later, the Lanham Act did. In exploring why the law of 1905 failed to respond to widespread innovation, and why the Lanham Act was celebrated for fulfilling such a long-overdue obligation, this article raises questions about conventionally linear accounts of the development of trademark law and practice.

The history of modern brands depends to a significant degree on the history of trademark law, but there are reasons to doubt how comprehensive standard versions of the latter history are. Business, economic, and even legal historians tend to accentuate the importance of the Anglo-Saxon common-law tradition and assume that the continental, civil law tradition followed in its wake. Yet the historical sequence of events suggests that almost exactly the opposite is true. Not only did the French have robust trademark law long before Great Britain and the United States, but the latter two countries only adopted trademark law after signing trademark clauses in diplomatic treaties with France. Drawing on newspaper accounts, public debates, specialist and general newspapers, as well as court cases and diplomatic negotiations, this paper argues that, to a certain degree, Anglo-Saxon trademark law was international before it was national. The evidence suggests that some of the easy verities on which arguments about modern brands, the “second industrial revolution,” and institutional economics are based may be more complex than is generally assumed.

Diversified trading networks have recently drawn a great deal of attention. In the process, the importance of diversity has perhaps been overemphasized. Using the trade in port wine from Portugal to Britain as an example, this essay attempts to show how a market once dominated by general, diversified traders was taken over by dedicated specialists whose success might almost be measured by the degree to which they rejected diversification to form a dedicated “commodity chain.” The essay suggests that this strategy was better able to handle matters of quality and the specialized knowledge that port wine required. The essay also highlights the question of power in such a chain. Endemic commodity-chain struggles are clearest in the vertical brand war that broke out in the nineteenth century, which, by concentrating power, marked the final stage in the transformation of the trade from network to vertical integration.

In his seminal 1972 essay on the “organization of industry,”G. B. Richardson argued that economists had generally viewed firms as “islands of planned co-ordination in a sea of market relations.” Business historians, too, had focused predominantly on the firm (or entrepreneur) and the market. In drawing attention when he did to the “dense networks of co-operation and affiliation by which firms are inter-related,” Richardson was on the forefront of what would become a noticeable shift in the analysis of business organization. There were many reasons for this transition. In particular, the comparative success of the “Japanese model,” with its “intermarket” keiretsu disturbed standard assumptions. (Richardson himself pointed to Japanese firms as thriving examples of interfirm relations.) Furthermore, it was becoming clear that in many emerging industries networked relations of industrial clusters were increasingly important. Comparative research suggested that new-technology firms with tightly drawn boundaries were at a competitive disadvantage compared to firms that had developed cooperative links not only to suppliers but even to competitors. To explain such developments, economists, organizational theorists, and business historians alike looked beyond not only the conventional boundaries of the firm but also the conventional boundaries of their disciplines. In particular, they turned to theories of networks, the topic of this special issue.

Historians generally agree that modern brands arose from the vertically integrated corporations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were used as competitive weapons between like firms. Looking at the alcoholic beverage trade and drawing on trade press, court reports, newspaper advertising, business records, and accounts of consumer behavior, I suggest that, on the contrary, supply chains made up of small firms played both an earlier and a significant part in the genesis of modern brands. In these chains, firms used branding not only to fight direct competitors but also to discipline and subordinate other links in the chain over whom they had no direct control and with whom they had to cooperate.