An entrepreneurial opportunity in process: creating an industrial fellowship in early twentieth century America

Abstract

This paper offers insight into the processes by which a pair of entrepreneurial actors envisioned and articulated their model for an industrial fellowship scheme designed to address their mutual needs, interests, and strengths. I employ the framework of ‘the new entrepreneurial history,’ which focuses on ‘the processes through which actors, individually and collectively, pursue uncertain future forms of value,’ to analyze the formation of an industrial fellowship research system as it developed in 1906 through a body of correspondence between a chemist, Robert Kennedy Duncan, and a businessperson, E. Ray Speare. The close-reading of these letters provide a clear view into the complex dance of ideation between these entrepreneurial actors as they imagined new opportunities for their fields, assembled resources, negotiated terms for information sharing, and crafted narratives and structures to foster legitimacy.