Precarious Professional Work by Alexander Styhre

Author:Alexander Styhre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Promoting an Enterprising Ethos and Entrepreneurial Spirit

The Entrepreneurial Function of Competitive Capitalism

The Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter is commonly associated with the image of competitive capitalism as a ceaseless process of renewal through innovations and its accompanying destruction of outmoded products and services. Schumpeter ([1928] 1991: 254) himself suggested it was the French economist Richard Cantillon who introduced the concept of the entrepreneur in the physiocrats’ economic framework in the eighteenth century. In Schumpeter’s economic model, the entrepreneur is by definition a debtor in the capitalist economic system, still having the skills, competence, and foresight to produce new innovations, which in turn generate sufficient income to both repay accumulated debt and to finance new ventures, either one’s own or ventures seeking finance investment by a new generation of aspiring entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur is thus a trickster figure in the capitalist system, a force that simultaneously produces novelty and destruction and being of vital importance for economic growth and renewal. In other words, as Stark (2009: 5) notices, “[e]ntrepreneurship is less about creating stability (building on success) than about creating disruptions that prevent path-dependent effects.” At the same time, as the entrepreneurial function of capitalism is understood at a systemic level, being inherently dynamic and destabilizing, on the level of day-to-day operations and work in, e.g., life science ventures, there is a need for some pockets of stability and predictability to maintain what Schumpeter spoke of as the “entrepreneurial function.”

Block and Keller (2009) explore the general tendency that innovation work is increasingly located in the intersections of collaborating organizations and that innovations are produced in collaborative networks. Block and Keller (2009) identify three trends in how innovations are produced: (1) there is a “declining centrality of the largest corporations to the innovation process”; (2) “inter-organizational collaboration” and small start-up firms play a more important role in the innovation process; and (3) public sector institutions take an expanded role as “both participants in and funders of innovation processes.” In other words, successful innovation work is to a smaller extent conducted in R&D departments in large corporations; instead, networks of collaborating organizations, supported by public sector institutions, play a more distinct role in producing innovations. Al-Laham et al. (2011: 574) substantiate these propositions and show that firms with “greater research alliance capabilities enjoy a higher likelihood of patents” (see also Ozmel et al. 2013; Powell et al. 2005; Obstfeld 2005; Uzzi 1999).

Collaborative networks, growing in importance for innovation, comprise many different actors including start-up firms, research universities, venture capital firms, legal advisors, and innovation system agencies such as business incubators and technology transfer offices (Ferrary and Granovetter 2009). These heterogeneous organizations contribute in their own ways to the field of life science innovation and ultimately to what Pisano (2006) calls the “science business”—companies that both live off and contribute to scientific research work. In this transformation of the field toward network-based activities, the entrepreneurial university (Etzkowitz 2003) and its enterprising professors (Haeussler and Colyvas 2011) have been given much attention. Colyvas and Powell (2007)

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