An Early Academic Enterprise: A Study of Technology Transfer

This article examines the foreign influence on the education of Norwegian business managers before 1940. As in other Scandinavian countries, Norwegian educational institutions were strongly inspired by German models. However, the first Norwegian business school was not established until 1936, and this study examines how managers were educated when institutions were weakly developed. It is argued that an efficient use of foreign institutions to train managers more than compensated for the lack of domestic institutions. This system of combining national and foreign educational institutions is related to the debate on the links between educational systems and economic development.