Institutional determinants of university spin-off quantity and quality: a longitudinal, multilevel, cross-country study

By Riccardo Fini, Kun Fu, M. Mathisen, Einar Rasmussen, Mike Wright. Small Business Economics, 2016

214 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The creation of spin-off firms from universities is seen as an important mechanism for the commercialization of research, and hence the overall contribution from universities to technological development and economic growth. Governments and universities are seeking to develop framework conditions that are conductive to spin-off creation. The most prevalent of such initiatives are legislative changes at national level and the establishment of technology transfer offices at university level. The effectiveness of such initiatives is debated, but empirical evidence is limited. In this paper, we analyze the full population of universities in Italy, Norway, and the UK; three countries adopting differing approaches to framework conditions, to test whether national- and university-level initiatives have an influence on the number of spin-offs created and the quality of these spin-offs. Building on institutional theory and using multilevel analysis, we find that changes in the institutional framework conditions at both national and university levels are conductive to the creation of more spin-offs, but that the increase in quantity is at the expense of the quality of these firms. Hence, the effect of such top–down changes in framework conditions on the economic impact from universities seems to be more symbolic than substantive.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea42289e57e83add3bc4fdc5a8f72b3befb8ee72

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Citations in the corpus

Conceptualizing academic entrepreneurship ecosystems: a review, analysis and extension of the literature (2018, background): “…2015), start-up intentions (Guerrero and Urbano 2014; Huyghe et al. 2016a), entrepreneurial propensity (Aldridge and Audretsch 2011), determinants of new venture formation (Fini et al. 2017; Karlsson and Wigren 2012), and role identity as a precursor to entrepreneurial behavior (Jain et al. 2009).”
Rethinking the Commercialization of Public Science: From Entrepreneurial Outcomes to Societal Impacts (2018, background): “It is also possible to compile large-scale data about entrepreneurial firms, including their origin and linkages with academic research (Fini et al., 2017; Pitsakis et al., 2015; Rasmussen et al., 2016).”
Universities and open innovation: the determinants of network centrality (2019, background): “Such spinout activity is found to be positively related: to intellectual eminence (Fini et al. 2017), including research profile (Lawton Smith et al.”
The Determinants of Entrepreneurial Intention of Young Researchers: Combining the Theory of Planned Behavior with the Triple Helix Model (2019, background): “…patents granted per year per university, the number of publications per faculty member, the number of intellectual property rights, and the size of the technology transfer office (Bergmann, Hundt, and Sternberg 2016; Fini et al. 2017; Ghio, Guerini, and RossiLamastra 2016; Meoli and Vismara 2016).”