The Niels Bohr Library & Archives and the Center for History of Physics at AIP are beginning a three-year study of the role that entrepreneurship plays in industrial research & development. The project is funded by AIP and by the National Science Foundation. We plan to interview approximately 100 physicists and their associates, representing several different cohorts of physics start-up companies. We are currently choosing candidates for the interviews, and we will include representatives from five still-active companies that were founded before 1990 and fifteen companies that have started since 1990 and are still in the early stages of development. In addition we will interview physicists from five start-ups that have failed, and five start-ups that have been acquired by other companies. We are developing the question-sets that we will use, and we've attached a sample draft below.
We welcome your suggestions of interviewees and questions, along with questions or inquiries about the study. The HoPE Study has grown out of our recently completed, five-year Study of the History of Physicists in Industry (HoPI). In the earlier project, we interviewed approximately 130 physicists, R&D managers, records managers, librarians and archivists at 15 of the 27 largest industrial employers of physicists in the U.S. The final report of the HoPI study is online at http://www.aip.org/history/pubs/HOPI_Final_report.pdf. It provides a history of research in America’s major corporate laboratories over the last 40 years and contains strategies and recommendations for preserving the historically valuable records that they produce. An article on the findings is scheduled for publication in the July 2009 Physics Today.
One of the most significant findings of the HoPI study is the shift towards development (as opposed to research) in major corporate laboratories. Increasingly we found that researchers in the big corporate labs are involved in knowledge acquisition in the open market as opposed to knowledge creation. While scholars have described some aspects of this development, they have generally not addressed the Adam Smithian free market aspects of the new R&D, where new technical knowledge has become a tangible good traded in the marketplace. In the HoPE study we will look at scientific startups that are increasingly doing more basic, longer-term research and development and, when successful, placing knew knowledge and even potentially disruptive technologies on the marketplace.
We are currently developing a list of startup "engines of innovation," where at least one of the founders was a physicist who we can draw on for the interview portion of our study. We look forward to suggestions from readers for additions to the list. We also welcome comments and critiques of the draft question set (below).
Joe Anderson (janderso{at}aip.org),
Orville Butler (obutler{at}aip.org),
Gregory Good (ggood{at}aip.org)
Download:
HoPE Draft Question Set
