Academic centers and/as industrial consortia in American microelectronics research

In the U.S., in the late 1970s and early 1980s, academic research centers that were tightly linked to the semiconductor industry began to proliferate – at exactly the same time as the first academic start-up companies in biotech, and slightly before the first U.S. industrial semiconductor research consortia. I show that some of the same factors stimulated institutional entrepreneurs to found both industrial consortia and academic centers. But...