Managing technological uncertainty in science incubation:A prospective sensemaking perspective

This paper focuses on the adaption challenge that confronts the top management team (TMT) of science incubators in situations of substantial technological uncertainty. To do that, we draw on the three-year longitudinal analysis of a major bioscience catalyst in the UK. Through the lens of ‘prospective sensemaking’, we follow the TMT as they work with stakeholders in their ecosystem to make sense of a significant technological shift: the convergence of life sciences, IT and other sciences in the health care environment. Our analysis reveals how prospective sensemaking resulted in the launch of a new strategy to exploit these emerging opportunities. However, stakeholders’ increasingly fragmented interpretation of the term convergence and the anticipation of legitimacy challenges in the wider ecosystem resulted in the repositioning of the incubator. Our findings contribute to extant research on science incubation. In particular, the paper sheds light on the complex interactions of incubator TMT’s with stakeholders in situations of technological change and uncertainty. Moreover, responding to technological change does not only affect the structural conditions of an incubator. Rather, it may also require changes to the positioning of the incubator in order to maintain legitimacy in the wider ecosystem. The paper also suggests managerial as well as policy level implications

Quantification rhetoric - cancer on television

This paper is concerned with quantification rhetoric: the manner in which numerical and non-numerical quantity formulations are deployed when proposing and undermining argumentative cases. The analysis is focused on a set of materials derived from the making and response to a current affairs television programme about the (putative) lack of success in charity-supported cancer research in providing effective treatments. The study demonstrates: (a) how a range of calculation, fractionation, aggregation and presentational practices can be selectively drawn on to form the scaffolding of contrasting versions; (b) the systematic translation between numerical (e.g. `1 percent') and non-numerical (e.g. `small') formulations to obtain specific argumentative effects; and (c) the role of basic, but often inexplicit, definitional decisions to both constitute phenomena in a manner that makes them countable, and also to select arenas for the effective advancing of quantification argument. Overall, the study illustrates the efficacy of recent discourse theory and analysis for understanding the rhetorical orientation of quantitative versions of the world