Innovation is increasingly based upon a “Triple Helix” of university-industry-government interactions. The increased importance of knowledge and the role of the university in incubation of technology-based firms has given it a more prominent place in the institutional firmament. The entrepreneurial university takes a proactive stance in putting knowledge to use and in broadening the input into the creation of academic knowledge. Thus it operates according to an interactive rather than a linear model of innovation. As firms raise their technological level, they move closer to an academic model, engaging in higher levels of training and in sharing of knowledge. Government acts as a public entrepreneur and venture capitalist in addition to its traditional regulatory role in setting the rules of the game. Moving beyond product development, innovation then becomes an endogenous process of “taking the role of the other”, encouraging hybridization among the institutional spheres.

Innovation in Innovation: The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations:

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue wit...

Knowledge in Transit

The ability to perform laboratory operations on small scales using miniaturized devices provides numerous benefits, including reduced quantities of reagents and waste as well as increased portability and controllability of assays. These operations can involve reaction components in the solution phase and as a result, their miniaturization can be accomplished through microfluidic approaches. One such approach, droplet microfluidics, provides a high-throughput platform for a wide range of assays and approaches in chemistry, biology and nanotechnology. We highlight recent advances in the application of droplet microfluidics in chip-based technologies, such as single-cell analysis tools, small-scale cell cultures, in-droplet chemical synthesis, high-throughput drug screening, and nanodevice fabrication.

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Droplet microfluidics: A tool for biology, chemistry and nanotechnology

The Learning Factory is a new practice-based curriculum and physical facilities for product realization. Its goal is to provide an improved educational experience that emphasizes the interdependency of manufacturing and design in a business environment. The Learning Factory is the product of the Manufacturing Engineering Education Partnership (MEEP). This partnership is a unique collaboration of three major universities with strong engineering programs (Penn State, University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, University of Washington), a premier high-technology government laboratory (Sandia National Laboratories), over 100 corporate partners covering a wide spectrum of U.S. Industries, and the federal government that provided funding for this project through the ARPA Technology Reinvestment Program. As a result of this initiative, over 14,000 square feet of Learning Factory facilities have been built or renovated across the partner schools. In the first two years of operation, the Learning Factories have served over 2600 students. Four new courses, and a revamped senior projects course which integrate manufacturing, design and business concerns and make use of these facilities have been instituted. These courses are an integral part of a new curriculum option in Product Realization. The courses were developed by a unique team approach and their materials are available electronically over the World Wide Web. Industry partners provide real-world problems and are the customers for students in our senior capstone design courses. As of December 1996, over 200 interdisciplinary projects have been completed across the three schools. These projects involve teams of students from Industrial, Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical Engineering and Business. Forty-three faculty members, across five time zones, are engaged in this effort.

The Learning Factory—A New Approach to Integrating Design and Manufacturing into the Engineering Curriculum

Many engineering colleges in the 1990s are busily revising the style and substance of engineering curricula to provide increased attention to design. The intent is to redress what many reformers see as an imbalance caused by too much emphasis on the analytical approaches of engineering science. In effect, current reforms are responding to changes made in American engineering colleges in the years immediately after World War II, when engineering curricula first fully embraced an analytical mode of engineering science. This paper examines how and why this earlier “re-engineering” of engineering education came to pass. It begins by summarizing the state of engineering education in the late 19th century. Then the paper discusses the role of European-born and educated engineers such as Stephen Timoshenko, Theodore von Kermen, and Harald Westergaard, who after 1920 prepared the ground for the later transformation of engineering curricula. The paper next discusses the efforts of leaders such as Solomon Cady Hollister and Eric Walker to introduce changes after 1945, and concludes by noting how their initial visions of curricula based on engineering science were altered during implementation.

The Other Re‐engineering of Engineering Education, 1900–1965

John Servos explains the emergence of physical chemistry in America by presenting a series of lively portraits of such pivotal figures as Wilhelm Ostwald, A. A. Noyes, G. N. Lewis, and Linus Pauling, and of key institutions, including MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and Caltech. In the early twentieth century, physical chemistry was a new hybrid science, the molecular biology of its time. The names of its progenitors were familiar to everyone who was scientifically literate; studies of aqueous solutions and of chemical thermodynamics had transformed scientific knowledge of chemical affinity. By exploring the relationship of the discipline to industry and to other sciences, and by tracing the research of its leading American practitioners, Servos shows how physical chemistry was eclipsed by its own offspring--specialties like quantum chemistry.

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Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America

Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906

The Making of an Engineer: An Illustrated History of Engineering Education in the United States and Canada. Lawrence P. Grayson

DOCUMENTING AND EXPLAINING the rapid rise of American science during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have concerned historians of science for some time now. One aspect of this work has been ascertaining when American scientists by and large ceased to be passive students and began to become active participants in international scientific life-participants whose contributions were comparable in quantity and quality with those of investigators working in European scientific centers. No single date can be assigned for a development of this sort, but there is general agreement that the crucial years in this transformation were framed by the decades of the 1870s and the 1930s. The 1870s saw the foundation of the first true graduate school in this country, the Johns Hopkins University. And it was during the 1930s that the large and growing company of sophisticated American scientists was augmented by the rapid and dramatic infusion of talent from central Europe.1 There is also agreement that to be more precise in dating the maturation of American science demands that one be specific as to field of study. Americans attained parity with their European colleagues faster in some specialties than in others. Europeans were coming to the United States to study genetics by 1915, long before it would have occurred to them to do so to study theoretical physics. American journals of geology enjoyed a high reputation in Europe by the mid 1890s, but as late as 1927 America's leading journal of physics was all but ignored in some physical institutes on the Continent.2

Mathematics and the Physical Sciences in America, 1880-1930

THE CREATION OF INSTITUTIONS for the direct application of scientific theory and methods to industrial problems has been a prominent aspect of the development of science during the past century. From the 1870s business firms in Germany began to use significant numbers of scientists for more than such limited purposes as quality control; science became essential to the product and process innovation upon which entire industries depended. ' By 1900 in Germany and by 1920 in America, businessmen might turn to several institutions where science could be harnessed to meet their needs. These included industrial research laboratories owned by individual firms or trade associations, private consulting laboratories, such as Arthur D. Little, Inc., and government-sponsored research institutes, such as the Physikalische-Technische Reichsanstalt and the National Bureau of Standards. The university did not remain untouched by the expansion of science-based industry. Indeed, university laboratories came to join the ranks of those institutions that served as sites for the application of science. German firms were pioneers in forging links between industry and university laboratories during the late nineteenth century.2 Similar bonds were created in the United States during the decades following the turn of the century, when many American corporations began directly to subsidize scientific research and training at universities. It is to be expected that the infusion of funds from industry should have elicited a response from academic institutions and their scientists. What was this response? How did industrial patronage affect the evolution of academic science, basic and applied? And how did it influence the goals and values of scientists themselves? This essay analyzes the impact of industrial patronage on the organization and practice of science at one institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Attention will be focused on developments within its programs in chemistry and chemical engineering, since most of the questions evoked by the rapid growth of sponsored research at MIT either found their first expression or were reflected

John W. Servos

Papers

Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America

Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906

The Making of an Engineer: An Illustrated History of Engineering Education in the United States and Canada. Lawrence P. Grayson

Mathematics and the Physical Sciences in America, 1880-1930

The Industrial Relations of Science: Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900-1939