Tuesday 20 November 2018 16:00 – 17:00 A. Payatakes Seminar Room
“Innovation Management Policies in Greece during the 20th Century. Institutional Organization and Experts’ Contributions on Intellectual Property and Technical Standardization Issues.”
Spyros Tzokas, PhD, Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS)
Abstract
The presentation focuses on aspects of the policy management for the Intellectual Property and the Technical Standardization, highlighting the conditions that allowed (or even prevented) the production of a “primary” innovation in the Greek case. Since the early 20th century and until the Second War, the ways for the transition from the theory to practice for the advancements of industrial and business firms -according the moto ‘Industry-based-Science’- had been at the core of the expert’s debates in Greece and internationally. In the 1920s, after the end of the First War, under the pressure of the international conventions and as well as under an intensive protectionist trade policy, the Greek state, among others, established a legal system to regulate and rationalize the institutional context of the original/innovative ideas (inventions, patents, trademarks) in order foremost to protect and afterwards to internationalize the domestic production. At the same time, the local scientific and technical communities cooperated with the foreign scientific communities by were participating in international association’s debates on the definition of the technical units and standards to establish a common terminology in which they would integrate rationally the technical knowledges and practices for the normalization of an international system of standardization of the industrial methods and products. This process is emerged here by the emphasis on the endeavors and the initiatives of engineers, scientists and lawyers who contributed to these issues under the influences of a violent ideological, socioeconomic and cultural transformation of societies in Greece and abroad during the Interwar period.