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The Regional Effect on the Innovative Performance of University Spin-Offs: a Multilevel Approach

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Abstract

Creation of university spin-offs has become one of the most supported ways for the university to accomplish the objective of knowledge transfer to the society. Since university spin-offs (USOs) are firms created to commercialize knowledge or technology developed by academic research, a key source of the potential contribution of USOs to knowledge economy lies in their innovation ability. External factors, like knowledge spillovers, might influence USOs’ innovation. This study tests the hypothesis that the regional context may partly determine the innovative performance of USOs. By applying an “interactionist approach,” we estimate a two-level logistic random intercept model for a sample of 167 USOs located in ten Spanish regions. Our results confirmed that firm-specific characteristics are important for explaining the innovative performance of USOs but show that regional context matters too.

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Notes

  1. As it is mentioned in the literature review section, there are other studies that analyze this issue but from a descriptive approach.

  2. We discarded 98 USOs created over the period 2006–2010 and 194 USOs that leaved SABI database over the same period.

  3. The number of groups required for multilevel analysis is >10, and the number of data observations required in each group >2 (Snijders and Bosker 1999).

  4. These regions were removed because they had two or less USOs. We did not include the following: Aragón, Baleares, Cantabria, Castilla-León, Castilla la Mancha, and Extremadura.

  5. Eurostat uses the aggregation of the manufacturing industry according to technological intensity and based on NACE Rev.2 at two-digit level.

  6. The LR test rejects the null hypothesis that σ 2 u  = 0 for all the models estimated.

  7. We also estimate Model 3 by replacing LN_NIF variable with the percentage of R&D workers in region and the percentage of adult population (+16) with higher education. Although these alternatives specifications did not substantially alter the results, the tests showed a worse fit.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Management and Marketing, University of Vigo, Campus Universitario As Lagoas s/n, 32004, Ourense, Spain

    María Jesús Rodríguez-Gulías

  2. Department of Finance and Accounting, University of Santiago de Compostela, Avda. do Burgo, s/n., 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    David Rodeiro-Pazos & Sara Fernández-López

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  1. María Jesús Rodríguez-Gulías
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Correspondence to David Rodeiro-Pazos.

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Rodríguez-Gulías, M.J., Rodeiro-Pazos, D. & Fernández-López, S. The Regional Effect on the Innovative Performance of University Spin-Offs: a Multilevel Approach. J Knowl Econ 7, 869–889 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-015-0287-y

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