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My research spans four ongoing projects. I collaborate closely with graduate student members of my "lab" at the University of Michigan and with colleagues at other institutions.
Young high-technology companies face a pair of strategic dilemmas. They must conform to existing industry models while differentiating themselves from competitors and they must use relationships to signal status while prospecting for novel information. High-tech business models are capital intensive. Thus, young organizations require repeated cash infusions. Their raison d'etre is innovation, but few possess all the capacities necessary to move a new product or service from conception to market. As a result, many high-technology organizations turn to networks to access the resources and information that fuel discovery. View/hide more info on Project 1 Garnering public and private equity investments requires that firms signal their membership in established segments of existing industries while also indicating their distinctiveness relative to peers and rivals. Network connections to cohesive clusters of existing partners offer clear indications of membership and status, but far-flung ties to diverse collaborators are the best source of the new ideas. The networks and identities necessary to secure capital and to pursue novelty are contradictory. This new, NSF-funded research project is designed to determine how organizations at the radical edge of research-intensive industries solve these problems; what their solutions mean for the development and maintenance of characteristic, industry-specific markets for technology, talent, & capital; and whether those differences can account for the sometimes radical innovations that emerge from collaborative research & development efforts at the frontiers of the knowledge-economy. Collaborators include:
Helena Buhr, Natalie Cotton & Maria Farka (2) Private Rights To Public Knowledge: Commercializing University Science The last thirty years have witnessed a sea change in U.S. Universities' engagement with commerce. This project draws on qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the various roles that academic institutions play in technological change, industrial growth, regional & national economic development. View/hide more info on Project 2 I am particularly concerned with the effects that increasing research commercialization is wreaking upon institutional arrangements that support academic scholarship. Treating universities as sources of valuable intellectual property, anchors for regional economic development & and seedbeds for entrepreneurship has had salutary effects on campus and off. Nevertheless, increased commercialization comes at the cost of significant and dangerous unintended consequences. My research considers the opportunities and the pitfalls associated with deeper commercial engagements. I examine shifting faculty attitudes and careers, the daily work-practices of university technology transfer offices, and changes in to the status hierarchies that govern academic life as a means to understand this complex institutional transformation at multiple time scales and levels of analysis. Collaborators include: Jeannette Colyvas & Woody Powell Selected papers:
--- In 1998, a University of Wisconsin scientist, James Thomson, successfully cultured human embryonic stem cells (hESC). Stem cells are pluripotent, blank “templates” that can be stimulated to develop into specific cells such as those found in the brain or heart. As a result, the therapeutic potential of hESC research has raised hopes about cures for currently incurable diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's & Diabetes. View/hide more info on Project 3 This research has proven controversial as it requires materials (cell lines) derived from human embryos, which the process destroys. Consequently, the scientific & clinical potential of hESC research has come into conflict with strongly held legal & moral convictions regarding human life. Nowhere is this conflict more apparent than in ongoing debates about whether and how federal research and development funds should be used to support hESC research. Stem cell science offers a strategic site for sociological analysis of interactions among politics, science, religion, & the public good. Collaborators include: Mariana Craciun, Jennifer McCormick & Christopher Scott Selected papers:
--- I have contributed to Woody Powell's biotechnology project since I was a graduate student. My work on human therapeutic and diagnostic bio-technology has focused on three aspects of the industry's evolution. View/hide more info on Project 4 Recent papers develop models of the institutional and relational arrangements that account for the industry's unique network dynamics. Other articles emphasize innovation in geographically clustered regions and the role that universities and other public research organizations play in the field's evolution. This work attempts to explicate the complicated network-institutional dynamics of a vibrant and important industry. Collaborators include: Woody Powell, Ken Koput, Fabio Pammolli, Kelley Packalen, Massimo Riccaboni, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Doug White & Kjersten Whittington Selected Papers:
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