Markus Perkmann

Imperial College London | Imperial · Imperial College Business School

Previous work on institutional complexity has discussed two solutions that organizations internally deploy when externally engaging with multiple institutional logics: blended hybrids, in which logics are combined throughout the organization, and structural hybrids, in which different logics dominate in different compartments within the organizatio...

We study how becoming an entrepreneur affects an academic scientist’s research. We propose that entrepreneurship will shift scientists’ attention away from intra-disciplinary research questions and toward new bodies of knowledge relevant for downstream technology development. This will propel scientists to engage in exploration, meaning they work o...

In this paper, we explore how actors benefit from bringing together incompatible institutional logics-an activity we call institutional arbitrage-and discuss why they do so despite the challenges it creates. We develop a taxonomy of four basic tactics of institutional arbitrage that are rooted in differences between logics in terms of resource valu...

Extant theory suggests that candidates with an unfocused identity—those spanning different categories—suffer from a valuation penalty because evaluators are confused by their profile and concerned they lack the required skills. We argue that unfocused candidates may be penalized for another reason; they threaten established social boundaries. This...

Universities are destined to engage in open innovation because they generally do not commercialize products themselves. Yet, they have strategic discretion over how to perform innovation and shape outcomes. I consider two dimensions of strategic choice for universities: the degree of control universities exert over how innovations are developed; an...

The literature on professional socialization suggests that their training and socialization lead physicians to prioritize professionally prescribed activities over entrepreneurial activity. This leaves unexplained how and why early career physicians would engage in entrepreneurship, a behavior that many healthcare organizations now seek to encourag...

This study examines the impact of public subsidies, and specifically, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards on university spinoff companies. Using unique data for a population of University of California spinoffs, we find pronounced differences between companies commercializing digital technologies (software and hardware), and those that...

Research on new venture creation in Africa is growing rapidly. This increasing interest reflects both the potential for entrepreneurship to contribute to the economic and social development of Africa, as well as the potential for this research to provide new insights that challenge and extend theories developed primarily from studies of North Ameri...

We provide a systematic review of the literature on academic engagement from 2011 onwards, which was the cut-off year of a previous review article published in Research Policy. Academic engagement refers to knowledge-related interactions of academic scientists with external organisations. It includes activities such as collaborative research with i...

Although academics are increasingly expected to share their research data and materials with other academics, many appear reluctant to do so. While extant research emphasises commercial involvement and peer influence as determinants of withholding behaviour, we hypothesise that the volume of competing commitments plays an important role in preventi...

In this essay, we discuss how collective identity shapes and constrains innovation in organizations and argue that this phenomenon deserves more attention from innovation scholars. Drawing on the existing literature, we distinguish three mechanisms through which a collective identity affects innovation – top management team cognition and emotion, o...

In this essay, we discuss how collective identity shapes and constrains innovation in organizations and argue that this phenomenon deserves more attention from innovation scholars. Drawing on the existing literature, we distinguish three mechanisms through which a collective identity affects innovation – top management team cognition and emotion, o...

In accreditation, candidates are evaluated against a standard for being admitted to a closed category, such as a profession or an organizational grouping. Accreditors typically have to simultaneously judge a candidate’s performance record and fit with the category. While prior work suggests that higher performing candidates may get away with lower...

In this essay, we argue that entrepreneurship and innovation researchers should pay more attention to experimentation as an approach to innovation and corporate entrepreneurship in established firms. While there is a growing body of research examining experimentation in start-ups, there is no corresponding literature investigating the role of exper...

How is an evaluating audience influenced by previous evaluations made by another audience? This question is critical to individuals and organizations reaching out to multiple audiences for key resources. While extant work has suggested evaluators are influenced by previous evaluations made by their peers, we develop theory about how evaluators’ ass...

How is an evaluating audience influenced by previous evaluations made by another audience? This question is critical to individuals and organizations reaching out to multiple audiences for key resources. While extant work has suggested evaluators are influenced by previous evaluations made by their peers, we develop theory about how evaluators’ ass...

(Published in Organization Science) Previous work on institutional complexity has discussed two solutions that organizations deploy internally when engaging externally with multiple institutional logics: blended hybrids where logics are combined throughout the organization, and structural hybrids where different logics dominate in different compar...

Successful integration of dispersed knowledge often requires collaboration between members of different communities. This poses challenges due to the social boundaries that separate communities. In this chapter, I explore how specially designed boundary organizations can facilitate cooperation across social boundaries and, thereby, support knowledg...

Research on hybrid organizations and institutional complexity commonly depicts the presence of multiple logics within organizations as an exceptional situation. In this article, we argue that all organizations routinely adhere to multiple institutional logics. Institutional complexity only arises episodically, when organizations embrace a newly sal...

We present an approach that aims to comprehensively account for scientists’ academic engagement and commercialization activities. While previous research has pointed to the economic and social impact of these activities, it has also been hampered by the difficulties of accurately quantifying them. Our approach complements university administrative...

(A developed version of this conference paper was subsequently published in Organization Science http://bit.ly/2LUD16H). Institutional complexity – being simultaneously exposed to multiple institutional logics – is commonly perceived as a challenge and source of tension for organizations. In this paper we argue that rather than being a source of...

Science-intensive firms are experimenting with ‘open data’ initiatives, involving collaboration with academic scientists whereby all results are published with no restriction. Firms seeking to benefit from open data face two key challenges: revealing R&D problems may leak valuable information to competitors, and academic scientists may lack motivat...

We examine how emerging organizations acquire shape by drawing on multiple organizational forms, a process we call organizational bricolage. Studying Indymedia London, a grassroots media collective, we propose a grounded theory of organizational bricolage that identifies how various types of organizational forms are selected and how they are instan...

This chapter has several objectives. Firstly, it introduces the case of the EUREGIO and presents evidence on its history, organisational set-up and policies . Secondly, it analyses the context conditions under which the EUREGIO emerged and the governance structures that were created as a result. Particular emphasis is put on the position and role o...

We explore the factors that facilitate the generation of products, interventions and practices in public science projects. Previous research has emphasized the role of highly successful star scientists for generating such translational outcomes but has paid less attention to team aspects. We develop hypotheses according to which translational outco...

This study explores how and under what conditions the social status acquired in a field may influence status judgments in another field. We focus on scientists’ involvement with industry and predict that academic status will be partially recognized by private research funders. Yet, such status spillovers are not unconditional, but may vary with the...

In this chapter, we investigate how firms work with universities in the course of their innovation activities. We provide an overview of three main modes of direct interaction between firms and universities: IP licensing, research services and research partnerships. We outline the main characteristics of each mode, its relative importance for firms...

A considerable body of work highlights the relevance of collaborative research, contract research, consulting and informal relationships for university-industry knowledge transfer. We present a systematic review of research on academic scientists’ involvement in these activities to which we refer as ‘academic engagement’. Apart from extracting find...

Companies’ relationships with universities are too important to be managed in an ad hoc fashion. When structuring a collaboration, managers should consider two key dimensions: time horizon and degree of openness. Each model of industry-university collaboration has benefits and drawbacks; the best format will depend on the goals and capabilities of...

Recent research has explored behavioral peer group influences on academics’ engagement with industry, but has not explicitly addressed under which circumstances these influences are more pronounced. Analyzing multi-source data for 1200 UK academic scientists and engineers, we find that peers’ behavior shapes individual engagement behavior, yet the...

The debate on the entrepreneurial university has raised questions about what motivates academic scientists to engage with industry. This paper provides evidence based on survey data for a large sample of UK investigators in the physical and engineering sciences. The results suggest that most academics engage with industry to further their research...

We investigate how universities research quality shapes their engagement with industry. Previous research has predominantly found a positive relationship between academics research quality and their commercialization activities. Here we use industry involvement measures that are broader than commercialization and indicate actual collaboration, i.e....

We investigate how universities' research quality shapes their engagement with industry. Previous research has predominantly found a positive relationship between academics' research quality and their commercialization activities. Here we use industry involvement measures that are broader than commercialization and indicate actual collaboration, i....

While firms increasingly engage in formal alliances with universities, there is a lack of tools to assess the outcomes of such collaborations. We propose a performance measurement system for university-industry alliances. We derive a success map from existing research on university-industry relations, indicating the causal relationships underpinnin...

Despite a rich extant literature, it is unclear what business models are. We assess three dominant conceptions of business models in the academic literature: as transactional structures, value extracting devices, and mechanisms for structuring the organization. To overcome the shortcomings of these approaches, we draw on theories of performativity,...

In the middle of 20th century a new phenomenon appeared in Western Europe and Scandinavia, parallel to the construction of a united Europe: the constitution of cross-border regions and their institutionalization by means of cross-border cooperation. Since then dozens of cross-border regions have appeared, especially since 1990, which for the most p...

We analyze the impact of university--industry relationships on public research. Our inductive study of university--industry collaboration in engineering suggests that basic projects are more likely to yield academically valuable knowledge than applied projects. However, applied projects show higher degrees of partner interdependence and therefore e...

Revealing proprietary information can encourage follow-on innovation but also carries risks. We ask how boundary organizations can help firms manage the trade-off between revealing information and appropriating benefits from revealing. We present an inductive study of the Structural Genomics Consortium, a research organization partly funded by phar...

This is a journal article. It will be published in the journal, Human Relations (© Sage Publications) and the definitive version will be available at: http://hum.sagepub.com/ We explore how transitory management fashions become institutionalized. Based on the concepts of institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work, we postulate that fashi...

We present a conceptual framework of academic consulting and explore its impacts on universities and the benefits to innovating firms. We distinguish between three types of academic consulting: opportunity-driven, commercialization-driven and research-driven. Exploring the implications of these different types, first, we postulate that consulting h...

This article was published in the journal, International Journal of Management Reviews [© Blackwell Publishing] and the definitive version is available at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/ijmr Organisations increasingly rely on external sources of innovation via interorganisational network relationships. This article explores the diffusion and...

This is an AIM Research Working Paper and is also available at: http://www.aimresearch.org/044wp.html. This paper was later superseded by the journal article "‘Healing the scars of history’: Projects, skills and field strategies in institutional entrepreneurship", published in the journal, Organization studies [© Walter de Gruyter & Co], available...

Perkmann M. (2006) Construction of new territorial scales: a framework and case study of the EUREGIO cross-border region, Regional Studies 40, 1–15. This paper proposes a framework for analysing re-scaling processes and applies it to a case study of the Dutch–German EUREGIO cross-border region. While much of the scale debate focuses on the causes a...

The author addresses the recent proliferation of cross-border regions, or ‘Euroregions’, in Europe. It is argued that EU multilevel governance patterns generate opportunities for entrepreneurial policy organisations to attract policy tasks and resources. This is conceptualised as policy entrepreneurship and applied to a comparative case-study analy...

This article reevaluates the regional embeddedness of multinational manufacturing branch plants in view of recent work on global production networks and extraregional links. It argues that the predominance of extraregional production linkages is not necessarily detrimental to regional economies and that such linkages can even compensate for weak te...

The article argues that management fashions can be interpreted as processes of emerging professionalisation around particular bodies of management expertise. By integrating insights from research on professions and professionalisation, management fashions are analysed as attempts by specific groups within organisations to establish themselves as pr...

The literature increasingly recognizes the interactive nature of innovation processes. Biomedical innovation, in particular, tends to be highly interactive. Given the ubiquitous nature of interactivity in biomedical innovation, we argue that the concept of innovation being interactive or distributed is not sufficiently differentiated to capture var...

This article was published in the journal, European Urban and Regional Studies [© Sage]. The definitive version: PERKMANN, M., 2003. Cross-border regions in Europe: significance and drivers of regional cross-border co-operation. European Urban and Regional Studies, 10(2), pp. 153-171, is available at: http://eur.sagepub.com/. The 1990s have seen a...

A recent conference in London addressed the issue of 'Measuring Knowledge Value'. A series of presentations contributed to the ongoing debate on how the benefits of Knowledge Management can be evaluated and measured. In the current business climate, there is a growing need to spell out the concrete impact of knowledge projects on business performan...

The concept of the cross-border region (hereafter CBR) has gained increasing prominence in policy and academic discourses, A CBR is a territorial unit that comprises contiguous subnational units from two or more nation-states. Since borders were hermetic barriers oniy on rare occasions in the history of national territorial states, the existence of...

By the beginning of 2000, there were more than seventy initiatives in Europe that referred to themselves as ‘Euroregions’, as ‘Euregios’ or in similar terms. These initiatives consist of more or less stable cooperative arrangements between neighbouring local or regional authorities across a European nation-state border, and can be subsumed under th...

This paper examines cross-border co-operation (CBC) and associated cross-border regions (CBRs) emerging within the European Union (EU). It analyses both as processes of institution building utilizing recent theories of governance and networks. The discussion is organized in four parts: (1) an overview of CBC in the EU to date and a suggested theore...

In a recent article in Sociology, Mouzelis argues that Lockwood’s distinction between system integration and social integration is, with some modifications, still to be retained because of its logical coherence and its methodological virtues. While its basic value is recognised, this article reconsiders the distinction in the light of some recent a...

The 1990s have seen a strong surge in the number of Euroregions and other cross-border regions all over Western and Eastern Europe. The article analyses the emergence of these local cross-border institutions in public governance by addressing their context, dimensions and causal underpinnings. First, it offers a brief background on the history of c...

The mainstream literature on management fashions assumes that fashions appear and disappear without having lasting effects. This article identifies the conditions under which management fashions become institutionalised and hence entrenched as management practices. Professionalisation is proposed as a mechanism through which fashions can become leg...

The article addresses the question how the European Commission can achieve successful policy implementation in a system that is characterised by loose multi-level policy networks and the absence of hierarchical command structures. This is shown with the example of EU regional policy, and cross-border co-operation in particular. The main argument is...

A mitjan segle XX, va aparèixer un nou fenomen a l’Europa occidental i a Escandinàvia paral·lelament a la construcció d’una Europa unida: la constitució de regions transfrontereres i la seva institucionalització mitjançant la cooperació entre elles. Des de llavors, s’han creat desenes de regions transfrontereres, especialment d’ençà de 1990, que ma...

This article was published in the journal, Organization Studies. The definite version of this paper will appear in Organization Studies (special issue on Institutional Entrepreneurship, 2007). We explore what institutional entrepreneurs do to propagate new organizational forms. Our findings are derived from a longitudinal study of the ‘Euroregion’,...

The article addresses the recent proliferation of Cross-Border Regions, or Euroregions, across the EU. It aims to explain why they have been more successfully institutionalised in some areas while they have had less success in others. It conceptualises Euroregions as the outcome of policy entrepreneurship strategies through which support is mobilis...

The article proposes a framework for analysing re-scaling processes and applies it to a case study of the Dutch-German EUREGIO cross-border region. While much of the scale debate focuses on the causes and consequences of re-scaling, the article addresses the conditions and circumstances in which new territorial scales emerge and suggests a framewor...