Expecting Innovation: experiences and expectations as foundation of research strategies in the German iron and steel industry during the 20th century

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The proposed project shall deal with the wide array of expectations that the German iron and steel industry held in connection with its expenditures in research and development. In relation to the science-based industries, the focus of economic and business history lies mostly on the chemical and the electro-technical. Yet the steel industry also invested considerable funds during the 20th century in order to better understand the metallurgical processes that influenced the production and the quality of steel. To this end, the steel industry not only financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute/Max Planck Institute for Iron Research from 1917 onwards, but also established a tight network of firm-based research facilities and cooperated intensively with technical universities. The main task of this project is to unravel, firstly, what the expectations were that led firms to devote huge amounts of money to this kind of research and upon what experiences these investment decisions were based. Was it, for instance, the impressive success of the chemical industry that led the iron and steel industry to similar decisions? Or was it the realisation that the existing metallurgical knowledge base was insufficient to meet the various contemporary challenges, from wartime production through to an emerging mass consumption society after World War II? Secondly, the research strategies used by firms to establish competitive advantages shall be identified and at the same time the expectations of these firms for the at times intense cooperation with other firms or scientific institutions. Thirdly, a considerable transnational steel research can be seen after World War II at the level of the European Coal and Steel Community. On all three levels the question is fundamental as to how earlier experiences formed expectations towards future steel and metallurgical research, whether these expectations have been transformed into a coherent research strategy and whether they fit into general strategic aims of the respective firms.