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The Departments of History of Universiteit Gent, Université libre de Bruxelles, Université Lille 3 and Università di Bologna are jointly organizing the conference “Academic entrepreneurship in history” on 12-13 March 2015 at the STAM city museum in Ghent, Belgium.

The meeting will bring together an international group of scholars engaged in research on the notion and practice of academic entrepreneurship from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.

The focus will be on the range of actions, behaviors and qualities of academic scientists and their employing institutions which can be seen as entrepreneurial in at least one of the many senses in which the entrepreneurship term has been used in the economics and business history literatures.

What we would like to discuss in a broad and comparative perspective is a) how entrepreneurial attitudes and practices coalesced and generated distinctive patterns of performance; b) in what relation these patterns stood to the changes that took place in different educational systems; c) how they were affected by economic, cultural, social, and political factors at multiple spatial levels; and d) how they evolved over time.

In addition to the history departments of the organizing institutions, the meeting is kindly supported by the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University.