Innovation Centers for Innovative Innovation: Universities, Industry, and the Global Hunt for Investable Science

• In Event: STS and Universities - III

Abstract

In an effort to find university researchers with great ideas and whose work had “yet to be published,” a major U.S. pharmaceutical company sent out business development executives to scour the country for potential university partners. By 2016, such partnerships had become easy because of something called, Translational Science and Medicine. A major force behind the “sudden explosion” of centers with the name, “innovation” across universities, translational science and medicine created a formalized pathway and process by which university research could become findable, organizable, and legible for industry and investors. Yet, these relationships hide a myriad of ethical messes: Analyses of shareholder documents show how these partnerships emerged out of a coordinated strategy by industry-partners to offload risks from early stage research & development onto non-profit universities. Based on ethnographic research, this project tracks the explosive impacts of the “translational imperative” upon university science, global innovation and higher education.

Author

• Mark Robinson, Creighton University