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Universities are a rich source of scientific innovations. Translating these innovations into high-impact products and services involves commercialization of the innovation. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gave universities control over the commercialization process. As such, technology transfer offices (TTO) have been established at most universities. Their role is to both protect the innovation through patents and copyrights and license the innovation to an entity for commercialization. Heretofore, most of TTO’s have focused on licensing to large, established companies. Only in recent years have they turned to licensing to startups, many of which are founded by the inventor-faculty. Furthermore, many universities are going beyond licensing to develop programs supporting these faculty-founded startups, with the hope of achieving return on their investment, retaining and recruiting talented faculty, creating jobs, and fulfilling their mission by helping to solve significant problems such as un-met medical needs.

Conventions occupy a unique space within fan culture and the creative enterprises of comics, gaming, and genre-based work. Yet, what began as niche gatherings have become sprawling spectacles, mirroring the mainstreaming of fandom from subculture to mass culture. Many changes to the structure and character of fan conventions, and thus fan culture, derive from the massive popularity of the San Diego Comic-Con, the largest and most prominent pop culture convention in North America. In this chapter, Rob Salkowitz analyzes how San Diego Comic-Con has retained its position at the top of convention industry and fandom, balancing the powerful forces of commercialization against its original mission to champion comics and fandom. It draws on interviews, economic research, convention demographics, and social media analysis to show how various subsegments—or “tribes”—use the Con as a platform for their own interests while simultaneously helping maintain the show’s integrity.

Chapter 2 argues that Olympic economic policy was a place of challenge in Cold War gymnastics, rather than cooperation, with opposing views extending from fans and media to differences between the Federation internationale de gymnastique (FIG) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Amateurism was a major issue for the IOC under Avery Brundage’s presidency, forbidding athletes any financial benefit from sport. State support rendered the amateur status of Eastern bloc gymnasts questionable. For US gymnasts, the amateur rule contributed to the decreased age of their best women, despite opportunities in collegiate gymnastics. Changed economic prospects coincided with the rise of US gymnastics. By the 1970s, the Olympics were commercializing, with Adidas branding appearing on leotards. By the 1980s, the games were professionalizing, as athletes advertised products and launched entertainment careers. But the FIG remained opposed to professionalization, leading to financial trouble in the 1990s and increasing its dependence on the IOC.

What has become a huge and lucrative global industry, engaging millions of people, started as a simple, do-it-yourself domestic activity, primarily as a humane way to assist birds during winter. This chapter explores the origins of the practice and follows recent developments and rapid commercialization, highlighting the key points of innovation and development of practices.

The conclusion argues that altogether their participation in various cultural discourses allows these analyzed television shows to pursue a kind of commercial taming of forms of previously radical critique, thought, and activism. Overall, the previous chapters’ analysis demonstrate how television’s commercial containments of political thought rarely occur neatly or without tension but always depend on these show’s respective serial genders and gendered serialities.

The word hip-hop encompasses both a type of social dance and a broader sub-culture. This sub-culture is based in four expressive elements: graffiti art, deejaying, emceeing, and dancing. Today there are a myriad of dance forms and styles residing under the umbrella term “hip-hop dance,” including locking, popping, b-boying, and hip-hop party dances. This chapter gives an overview of these forms, with a particular focus on party dances. Party rockin’ has been present since the beginning of the hip-hop scene in the 1970s, with dances like the Gigolo and the Patty Duke. However, in the 1980s these new social dances took on a flamboyant b-boy-esque battle style, replacing circles of b-boys/b-girls with party rockers. These new hip-hop party dances came into existence as a result of hip-hop music, with rappers making call and response records such as Do the Wop by B-Fats. The author also examines the commercialization of hip-hop dance.

Chapter 3 focuses on the 1930s and 1940s when American influence was already recasting Rio’s commercial thoroughfares with the help of Brazilian merchants. Retailing in Rio, São Paulo, and other Brazilian cities began to emulate that of North America. These changes were part of a larger romance between Brazil and the U.S that was broken, only in part, when the World War II-era alliance failed to yield a measure of postwar prosperity or abundance as recompense for wartime shortages and surrender of sovereignty over strategically crucial north-eastern bases. Against this backdrop occurred the professionalisation of advertising and sales promotion and the continued commercialization of the press and radio, buoyed by radio soap operas.

This chapter begins with the case of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN), a Rice University research center that a made a big difference in the science of the small. CBEN embodied the key elements of the Organized Innovation framework. The chapter defines the framework and its three pillars: Channeled Curiosity, Boundary-Breaking Collaboration, and Orchestrated Commercialization. We explain the role of universities, government, and industry in this framework and explain how it builds on the latest research on innovation. Organized Innovation amounts to a new blueprint for how universities, government, and business can join forces to create technology revolutions that benefit society.

This chapter opens with the artificial retina, describing how it gave new sight to an Italian man blind for thirty-six years. The device, developed in large part at the Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems research center at USC, is the product of Orchestrated Commercialization. This third pillar of the Organized Innovation framework refers to coordinating complementary players—such as researchers, technology transfer professionals, and entrepreneurs—to maximize the success of the technology commercialization process. The chapter defines this pillar and explains how to achieve it. The following actions are key to Orchestrated Commercialization: coordinate the network; elevate role models; revisit incentives for commercializing academic research; appoint an industrial liaison officer; improve technology transfer and administrative execution; bring in entrepreneurial and business expertise. The story of the artificial retina highlights how smart coordination is vital to bringing breakthrough technologies to society.

Chapter Two covers the same time period as Chapter One, but draws from newspapers and letters instead of financial records to emphasize the perspective of participants rather than investors. The result is that readers see how investors failed to create the spatial and behavioral distinction they desired, and so any attempt to claim exclusive gentility triggered aggravation and social conflict rather than awe and deference. This result was also influenced by the imperial crisis going on at the same time, which emphasized notions of “liberty” and “equality” and so made common people less likely to accept efforts to craft distinction in public settings such as sporting events. The chapter closes by examining how the imperatives of running a popular insurgency led the Continental Congress to essentially ban genteel sport as part of its Articles of Association in 1774.

Although investors in the early national period originally hoped to build a sporting culture that granted them both profit and prestige, the demand for profit-seeking created by the economic culture of the post-Revolutionary years ultimately forced them to decide whether to maximize revenue by appealing to the largest possible audience or craft prestige for themselves by making sure that venues and content emphasized exclusivity and celebrated the elite. The social history of attending sporting events in the early national period reveals how demands from nonelite audiences pushed investors and professionals to prioritize profit over prestige. It then concludes by detailing how white men united to limit the confrontation that resulted from broader accessibility by erecting gender and racial barriers to full participation, and how politicians then borrowed from sport to construct a white male republic rooted in the pursuit of manhood and profit. In sum, then, this chapter highlights how elites and investors responded to popular opposition to exclusive elitism by conceding their desire for social and cultural authority and focusing on deference earned through wealth and white male brotherhood.

Chapters 5 examines a conservative backlash, and two ministers who attempted to revitalize the verbal Word in the face of liberal evangelicalism: the Baptist dispensationalist Isaac Haldeman and the revivalist Billy Sunday. One cultivated devotional ways of reading the Bible; the other brought new force to the preached word. The chapter also notes the changing perception evangelicals had of the city: from a poverty-stricken, immigrant filled industrial wasteland to, increasingly, the center of a growing American commercial culture that promoted leisure and consumption and celebrated cultural diversity.