In 1888, George Eastman introduced Kodak, one of the first affordable, user-friendly photographic film cameras. The camera’s success planted seeds for a global market for amateur photography that the Eastman Kodak Company would dominate for over a century. Leveraging substantial profits from photographic film, Kodak invested heavily in research and development, continuously innovating in amateur photography and pioneering new technological domains. From the 1970s onward, as growth in its core business began to slow and new imaging technologies emerged, Kodak embarked on significant strategic renewal initiatives. These efforts included diversifying into industries such as plain paper copiers and pharmaceuticals and developing digital products for photography applications. Despite considerable investments in innovation and growing new businesses over several decades, Kodak ultimately failed to find a viable path to sustaining its success; it filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The company’s decline illustrates the inherent challenges of sustaining a successful enterprise in evolving markets and technologies. Furthermore, it raises critical questions about the effectiveness of strategic renewal efforts, particularly when high-performance expectations are set within an environment of significant uncertainty.

This article traces the history of the life sciences business in the Cambridge–Boston area and explores how it became the global epicenter of the modern therapeutics industry. While business history scholarship on therapeutics is extensive, few have studied recent technological modalities—from therapeutic proteins to cell and gene therapies—or adopted a regional ecosystem perspective. Based on archival materials and oral histories, this research bridges these works and incorporates insights from the innovation ecosystems framework. It considers how dynamic interactions between an evolving network of complementary and interdependent actors, including therapeutics firms, universities, hospitals, and risk capital providers, enhanced innovative capacity. This perspective also illuminates how ecosystem strength derived from the co-evolution of actors—from universities restructuring technology transfer offices to academic scientists becoming entrepreneurs. The research further highlights the nonlinearity of innovation processes. It shows how an extraordinary interplay between structural advantage, serendipitous timing, and strategic actions cultivated an unparalleled capacity to translate emergent technologies into novel therapies.

Extant research has highlighted the impact of legal innovations on the organizational choices made by entrepreneurs and traced the diffusion of new business forms across international borders, such as the private limited liability company (PLLC). This paper uses a newly compiled database of all firms operating in Vienna between 1900 and 1936 to examine the PLLC’s impact on the Austrian business landscape following its introduction. Its findings reveal that the PLLC quickly replaced other legal forms. While suitable for a wide range of sectors, the PLLC was particularly attractive to new industries burdened by machinery investment rather than wage costs. By empirically demonstrating that the PLLC filled a critical gap in the legal framework of Austria, this study highlights the broader importance of legal forms as instruments for fostering entrepreneurial activity, shaping economic structures, and driving development.

This research reconstructs the business dynamics behind the evolution of the European mutual fund industry, which led Luxembourg to become its main international gateway since the 1960s. We analyze this local industry to understand how political and financial élites influence the economic specialization of small states. We argue that a closely-knit community of local professionals and politicians, well-versed in corporate and European legislation, leveraged the Grand Duchy’s small state status within the nascent European Community to become a financial hub specializing in mutual funds within an emerging network of international financial centers. This position was achieved through bifurcation of sovereignty strategies on the basis of two main premises. First, on the systematic acceptance of conflicts of interest within local financial and political leadership, comprising overlapping roles, revolving-doors, and familial ties in business relationships. Second, on regulatory engineering practices, such as the dynamic interpretation of laws, and the strategic planning of directive assimilation to advance Luxembourg’s interests as opposed to its EU counterparts. The analysis uses archival material from nine archival collections and oral history interviews.

As a source of credit on residential real estate in North America, private individuals played a vital role well into the 1950s, especially in Canada. Rare national surveys, together with varied case studies in Canada and the United States, indicate that they provided land contracts, construction loans, and first and junior mortgages to a variety of people, including family and friends and many strangers. Contacts were arranged through social networks, agents, and brokers. By comparison with major lending institutions, their role and significance have been overlooked, their loans often unrecorded. In the early decades, lenders included men and women in a range of occupations, not least because many owners offered credit to buyers to facilitate sales. By the 1950s, women, professionals, and businessmen were the main investors, the chief beneficiaries being lower-income households in less desirable districts. Some personal lenders were ill-informed or exploitive, but most enabled families to realize their aspirations to own. This sector’s decline was a consequence of federal policies that promoted national mortgage markets, making the business more professional but displacing practices that had enabled many home buyers and builders.

The automotive lobby’s voluntary commitment to reducing CO2 emissions in 1998 was widely perceived as evidence of the influence of multinationals on European decision-making. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) denounced the lack of transparency. Interviewing negotiators or quoting published reports, scholars focused on the disappointing effects of this agreement. Pending the opening of the public archives, this study is based on primary industry archives, which shed light on the highly confidential negotiation phase. Exchanges within the industry and meetings with the European Commission reveal the limits of the automotive lobby’s power, which had to face internal divisions and seemed to suffer more than choose the agreement. It was the result of Directorate-General (DG) III’s maneuvering. The companies “voluntarily” accepted it as the lesser evil, as it was more advantageous than a directive. The idea of standards being co-constructed by public and private stakeholders needs to be qualified: the balance of power was unbalanced. With these soft regulations, it was above all the Commission that strengthened its position in the decision-making process, to the detriment of other stakeholders such as the European Parliament.

Just before World War I, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) geographically expanded its trade in the Canadian Arctic to derive profits from Arctic fox fur and secure its position in a global value chain (GVC) delivering fur to metropolitan consumers. The “problem of nature” challenged the company’s business venture. Furthermore, “nature” was made and remade by the HBC’s own capital investments. The fox trade itself changed human ecology. Technology transfers to Inuit modified their hunting regimes to increase the company’s returns of polar bear skins. Though these skins had high potential market value, modes of production introduced by the HBC to the Arctic precluded the company from sending high-quality products to metropolitan dressers. Within a changing Arctic human ecology, the HBC produced one highly valued commodity for the market while producing another from which it could derive only modest profit. The HBC’s fox and polar bear trade at the onset of the last century suggests ways that business empires can set off complex and unanticipated changes in human ecologies and, therefore, the dynamics of nature and business at their very peripheries.

Business-led conservation of wildlife based on private property rights and formal governance has often yielded inconsistent results. In pursuit of alternative approaches that prioritize long-term sustainability in wildlife exploitation, this paper studies the novel case of the Nivkh people’s bear hunting enterprise, which functioned in the Lower Amur Basin and Sakhalin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. I demonstrate that the Nivkh ran their bear enterprise sustainably via a conglomeration of traditional ecological knowledge, religious beliefs, and informal social institutions, satisfying their personal demand for the animal while successfully selling bear furs and gallbladders to foreign merchants. Such developments were also supported by the regional political economy in which the Nivkh retained a large degree of autonomy. The paper highlights the productive impact that ideas of sacrality, human–animal kinship, and reciprocity exert on sustainability in wildlife enterprises while also stressing the importance of careful government policy in relation to Indigenous conservation systems. The study validates its claims through field notes, expeditionary journals, state reports, and historical and ethnographic research.

This article explores the development of a group of free-standing companies in Colombia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The article illustrates how the British investor Shirley Jenks, who closely matches the description of the “gentlemanly capitalist” social class, leveraged “free-standing companies” as an investment vehicle to construct interconnected strategic business interests. The article illustrates the versatility offered by “free-standing companies” and how, in combination with “collaborating elites,” the mechanisms of the London capital market could be used to construct and administer a significant business empire in the periphery with little local presence or direct influence.