The growth of commercialization — facilitating organizations and practices: A Schumpeterian perspective

During the long economic upswing of the 1980s and 1990s, the successful commercialization of new technology went together with the appearance of new financial vehicles, new organizational forms, and new practices promoting and mediating the transfer of the new technology from lab to market. They included business incubators, technology parks, venture capitalist firms, operators specializing in mergers and acquisitions, venture funds, and initial public offerings in the stock market. Commercialization-facilitating organizations and practices like these (here called “commercialization facilitators”) are themselves born by dynamic processes in a capitalist economy that can be analyzed in Schumpeterian terms. We discuss at some length a unique university-based institution that has an impressive track record of creating and operating new facilitating models: the IC2 Institute (Innovation, Creativity and Capital) of the University of Texas. During a twenty-five year period, IC2 came to be instrumental in the conversion of the local economy to the high tech age. The Institute’s activities span the range of the technology transfer and commercialization process, from the development and dissemination of new knowledge to the actual running of business incubators. We identify the IC2 Institute as a “second order” facilitator and discuss its possible global evolution into a “third order” facilitator.