Imaginaries of Invention Management: Comparing Path Dependencies in East and West Germany

The ways in which societies and institutions institutionalise and practice invention
management reflects not only how new ideas are valued, but also imaginaries about
the role of science and technology for societal development. Often taking the US Bayh-
Dole-Act as a model, many European states have recently implemented changes in
how inventions at academic institutions are to be handled to optimise their societal
impact.
We analyse how these changes have been taken up - and made sense of - in regions
with different pre-existing infrastructures, practices and semantics of invention
management. For doing so, we build on a comparative analysis of continuities and
changes in infrastructures, practices and semantics of invention management in North-
Rhine Westphalia (NRW, a former Western state) and Saxony (a former GDR state) to
reflect on how academic institutions have been handling inventions along transforming
socio-political contexts. Building on document analysis and qualitative interviews with
research managers, we discuss ongoing differences in practices of invention
management and the semantic framing of the societal value of inventions in NRW and
Saxony, and discuss how this can be understood before the background of their
ideological, political and economic separation until reunification in 1990.
Joining the conceptual perspectives of path dependencies and sociotechnical
imaginaries, we argue that two critical incidents in the history of these states (the
reunification in 1990 and a legal change in 2002) allowed for wide-ranging institutional
alignments, but also allowed path dependencies in practices and semantics of
invention management to prevail.