Innovations and Entrepreneurs in Socialist and Post-Socialist Societies

Jouko Nikula (born 1954) is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Helsinki. He received both his MA (1982) and PhD (1996) in Sociology at the University of Tampere. He has extensively studied the transformation of class structure and the development of the middle classes in post-socialist societies, especially the formation of the class of private entrepreneurs.

Ivan Tchalakov (born 1960) is Associate Professor in the Department of Institutional and Applied Sociology at the University of Plovdiv, and in the Institute of Studying Societies and Knowledge at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He received his MA in Sociology at the University of Sofia (1984) and PhD at the Institute of Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1988). Between 1999 and 2003, he was elected as President of the Bulgarian Sociological Association. His research interests are in the field of science and technology studies, focusing on the transformation of innovation systems in post-socialist countries, and science and technology development in South-Eastern Europe after the Second World War.