Medical Technology's Source of Innovation

This article presents research based on a case study of Bern University Hospital and the Greater Bern Area that analyses the hospital's influence on innovation in the regional medical device industry. The study draws upon the concept of sectoral innovation systems enlarged with a space-oriented model of agents' innovation-related behaviour. Its main data stem from semi-structured interviews with representatives from regional companies and the hospital. The findings confirm the systemic character of innovation in medical technology and the role of university hospitals as the main functional source of medical device innovation. At the inception of the medical device industry, innovations were implemented in a regional setting, but with the maturation of the industry, this setting has yielded to an almost global setting for innovation. This international setting became prevalent largely due to the marketing considerations of the industry, showing that from an industrial management point of view, product innovation and the diffusion of innovation are heavily interlinked activities. The article concludes that the hospital's relevant influence at a regional level lies not in the present but in the past, when timely innovative impulses from physicians enabled this regional industry's successful participation in the emerging medical device sector.     

The Mystification of Spices in the Western Tradition

The oriental spices that so dazzlingly performed in the early modern economy were mystified in the sense that, from being rare, valuable and of as yet unspecified provenance, these objects were raised within the western phenomenological scheme beyond the commonplace and ascribed marvellous properties. This was part of the mystification of the East, a time-worn conception of western society inherited from the first expeditions of Alexander the Great, which created an enduring and formative legend of oriental luxury, abundance, and exuberance that the medieval penchant for marvels (Mirabilia) conveniently appropriated. Spices too were mystified through the medium of biblical literature and specifically through associations with the terrestrial paradise, which was a place much debated by cosmographers until the seventeenth century. This paper concentrates on the process of mystification rather than its projection, and suggests that it constituted a self-conscious aesthetic - if held within certain imaginative bounds - even when confronted by empirical knowledge. I conclude with a critical discussion of quite how marvellous the marvellous must have seemed to its audience, and posit it somewhere between the mythical and legendary horizons of that society.