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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.

In stark contrast with their fathers, the young men whose narratives make up this chapter long for identities based on self-expansion and personal enrichment. Mirroring Turkish society's pivot away from state-based paternalism, these young men see themselves as embarking on projects of "entrepreneurship of the self" where old ideals of paternal selflessness are replaced by new ideals of individualism, ambition, and pleasure seeking. As these men reject the traditional modes of masculinity modeled by their fathers, they explicitly seek new types of affective relationships with "selfish" women who break from the traditional models of female selflessness. Yet even as these men seek recognition and support for their own self-making from women who are equally ambitious and independent, they cannot completely repudiate the maternal model, longing at the same time for "positive," "selfless" girls who subordinate their desires to the needs of the relationship. The tension of this paradox is felt most acutely by men from conservative and rural family backgrounds whose new identities as upwardly mobile high-achievers necessitate recognition from equally high-achieving women, but who are unable or unwilling to completely relinquish their need for male dominance and control in order to make such relationships successful.

Since the late 1990s, the figure of the creative entrepreneur has played an increasingly significant role in the working life of performers and theatre-makers across the UK and Europe. Focusing on the burgeoning economy and ecology of contemporary arts festivals as a key environment for the creation and staging of solo work, this chapter explores the increasing demand for self-employed artists to pursue individualised risk and reward, and to self-exploit. While unjuried events like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe emphasise that they are ‘open to all’, participation requires artists to take on the risk of significant personal debt and embrace often narrowly-drawn industry standards. In this context, ‘free’ fringe festivals – and the work of artist-led groups like Forest Fringe and BUZZCUT – suggest alternative modes of practice in resistance of neoliberal economies.

Public Benefit Corporations (“PBCs”) are a revolutionary new form of business organization that overturn the fundamental corporate principle of shareholder wealth maximization. Of the many questions that surround this new entity type, perhaps the most perplexing is why Delaware – the most influential and important state for corporate law by far – chose to adopt it. I explore this troubling question through qualitative empirical research. I find that Delaware primarily wanted to serve the needs of social entrepreneurs and financiers, but also hoped to harness the power of capitalism to remedy social ills that government has so far failed to fix. The PBC statute rather poorly implements either of these goals. The PBC statute is not a very good enforcement tool. On the other hand, the statute may prove an effective reinforcement tool, aiding sincere social entrepreneurs to pursue their various missions. Also, private ordering, such as certification by outside entities like B Lab, may fill many of the important gaps left by the law.

This chapter provides a positive assessment of Richard Nixon's appeals for minority enterprise as a crucial component of increasing black support for the GOP. As such, it provides a counter to traditional understandings of the Nixon Administration as one that exploited racial tensions through a “Southern Strategy.” The chapter understands minority enterprise initiatives as the echo of a central theme of black Republican ideology: one that wedded liberal appeals for racial equality with a belief in traditional Republican principles of self-help, thrift, entrepreneurship, and free enterprise. The chapter holds that black activists had long called for the implementation of an aggressive movement for economic civil rights and that Nixon's “Black Cabinet”—a loosely assembled group of black Republican appointees—was central to this effort. The cabinet's specialized outreach program used the Nixon administration to advance an alternative social, economic, and political civil rights agenda that viewed economic uplift and political shrewdness as the final, critical step in the struggle for racial equality and black independence.

The practices of political sovereignty, such as nation building, and the achievement of a stable economy through practices of economic sovereignty are intimately intertwined— and the role of small-business diversity in creating this economic stability can be indispensable. Consequently, these relationships and the situational interdependence of government-owned corporations (e.g., gaming) and privately owned small businesses, especially in the case of the EBCI, are vital to supporting the practices of both political and economic sovereignty, especially when countering the effects of the US governments’ economic hegemony. Drawing on the economic anthropology literature helps to complicate notions of “per caps” (dividends) operating as universal basic income and guaranteed annual income on the national level while also expanding notions of entrepreneurial impacts, such as in the realm of cultural reclamation.

Our applied research/practice team of two attorneys and a social scientist produced this case study of an immigrant woman, who learned to be an entrepreneur. Our central narrative describes how New York City government’s response to mobile food vending prioritized powerful special interests at the expense of expanding economic opportunities in the service of the greater public good. This central narrative develops through our detailed description of an immigrant woman’s circuitous path to business and back to wage labor.

This chapter discusses the mainstreaming of co-operatives against the background of the global financial crisis of 2008. It defines the concept of mainstreaming, examines the ‘debt trap’ which many organisations experienced following the crisis, notes the greater levels of resilience among co-operative and mutual organisations, and proposes an initial framework to monitor the mainstreaming of co-operatives.

The conclusion spells out how the theory of finance as organized conflict outlined in the book relates to approaches that emphasize scarce information as the reason for the existence of banks. It discusses how the theory extends Schumpeter’s insights on the relationship between bankers and entrepreneurs. The findings from the comparison between the United States and Italy are summarized, emphasizing the roles of the politics of the budget and of political culture. The chapter ends with a sharpened typology of wildcat and conservative bankers, discussing how this helps us understand more contemporary financial events, such as the rise of financial innovation over the past 30 years.

This chapter describes the rise of a challenger organization, called NPower, that took advantage of transformations in the Circuit Rider social movement to rise in prominence. NPower combined some of the Circuit Riders’ social values with market values of technology entrepreneurs into a hybrid organizational form: the social enterprise. The result attracted funding from for-profit companies such as Microsoft as well as other large for-profit technology firms. Materially, these resources allowed NPower to grow rapidly and eventually gain national prominence. Symbolically, the support of for-profit firms provided a different basis for moral legitimacy in the nonprofit technology assistance field, moving the account of worth away from the larger social good and into more narrowly defined economic goods, such as efficiency gains.

What role did the entrepreneur play in shaping Ancient Mesopotamia, the “cradle of civilization”? This chapter demonstrates how the entrepreneurial drive transformed this pagan Middle Eastern society. Most relevantly, it helped spur Mesopotamia’s transition from an agrarian Bronze Age economy to a bustling hub of urban commerce, now a defining characteristic of Western Civilization. It will also highlight how this transformation spurred similar development throughout the then-known world.

Roughly two thousand years later, a tribe of “middlemen and merchants” transformed a small strip of land in modern-day Lebanon into the hub of intercontinental trade. Considered one of the ancient world’s most entrepreneurial and inventive cultures, the merchant-sailors of Phoenicia connected Africa, Europe, and Asia Minor into a network of trade so vast and profitable that their success was marveled at by Ezekiel and other authors of the Old Testament. The chapter also highlights more recent discoveries pertaining to this vanished civilization of seaborne merchants, such as its conversion of a sparsely populated Sicilian island into the site of a thriving wine-making and trading industry.

The entrepreneurial experience in Rome is an insightful illustration of enterprise as practiced under unfavorable and, at times, even hostile, conditions. While Roman nobility and slaveowners steered clear of the "dirty work" of entrepreneurship, slaves and former slaves, many of whom were foreigners, eagerly climbed the entrepreneurial ladder. The chapter describes how, in some instances, the ladder led not only out of bondage but to great wealth and even a measure of respectability.

It is common knowledge that, as Europe slid into its Dark Ages, the Islamic world expanded rapidly and enjoyed several centuries of military, commercial, and intellectual dominance. However, the central role of entrepreneurship in not only the commercial but the territorial expansion of this new civilization is an overlooked but fascinating dimension of this historical period. Such phenomena as the slave trade and the Arab commercialization of East African coffee are examined as examples of the entrepreneurial vigor of Islamic civilization during its expansionary heyday.

By the Medieval Era, the Far East had not only caught up with Christian and Islamic civilization but, at least in commercial terms, had surpassed both. From the invention of fiduciary (or paper) money to sophisticated forms of urban development and labor specialization, Chinese entrepreneurs had transformed their society. The chapter describes how these entrepreneurs, some of whom were Buddhist monks, shaped and distinguished China during the Tang and Song Dynasties.

From Cornelius Vanderbilt to Henry Ford and all the way to Bill Gates, America's history since her independence is replete with astonishing entrepreneurs who changed not only U.S. society but the entire world in profound and irreversible ways. The chapter highlights some of history’s most noteworthy American entrepreneurs, some of whom, like the slave turned inventor-entrepreneur Andrew Beard, are not well-known by the modern business reader. In this manner, the chapter illustrates how, to a great extent, America been molded by entrepreneurship and its attendant marvels and perils.