Practices and Cultures of Innovation: Nanoengineering and Entrepreneurial Science Through University-State-Industry Networks

Emily York
Communication
UC San Diego

I have completed four years of ethnographic research examining the emergence of nanoengineering at UCSD as an entrepreneurial science located within the ‘innovation ecosystem’ of university-state-industry networks. I am currently working to situate this entrepreneurial environment within larger social and historical developments in the University of California system. UC President Napolitano has recently created the “UC Innovation Council” and “UC Ventures” initiatives, and the UC is broadly working to establish an entrepreneurial culture even within undergraduate education, for example through student-friendly incubators. Building on my work as an archival assistant for UCSD’s San Diego Technology Archive documenting local university-industry partnerships in the 1980s, the archive at UC-Santa Cruz will provide additional historical data that will serve to contextualize current efforts within the UC System.