Tekes San Jose and SCANCOR

On Tuesday 21st of November, I rented a car as we needed to travel around the Bay area intensively. Next week I would also travel to University of California Santa Barbara which is very difficult to reach by public transportation. (There is a small airport in Santa Barbara but the flights there appeared to be expensive.)

With Sari Stenfors we first visited Tekes office in San Jose. The head of the office, Reijo Kangas told us, among other things, that Tekes is going to move to a new office space in Santa Clara in January 2007. The move is based on the formation of FinNode, an innovation centre that will serve Finnish and American companies and researchers. The innovation centre has been established by Finpro, Sitra, the Academy of Finland, Tekes, and VTT.

From San Jose I headed quickly back to Palo Alto and Stanford University where I had a meeting with Prof. Walter W. Powell who is the director of SCANCOR. Woody, as he is often called, gave interesting examples of their research. One paper that he discussed was "Roads to Institutionalization: The Remaking of Boundaries Between Public and Private Science" by Jeannette A. Colyvas and Walter W. Powell (Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 27, 305-353). In the paper they illustrate how archival materials may be systematically assessed to capture notable changes in organizational practices and categories.