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University support and the creation of technology and non-technology academic spin-offs

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Abstract

The literature on academic entrepreneurship typically assumes that creating a supportive environment in a university can result in a higher rate of establishment of academic spin-offs in a relatively straightforward manner. In contrast, we argue that, at times, academics choose to launch an independent company vis-à-vis pursuing alternative business engagement activities when their university provides inadequate support. Drawing from hybrid entrepreneurship and necessity entrepreneurship, we model the individual decision to spin-off as a reaction to the organizational characteristics of the parent university, rather than to its outcome. Through a longitudinal study of 559 spin-offs from 85 Italian universities from 1999 to 2013, we find that although stronger administrative support from the parent university leads academics to create more technology spin-offs, a U-shaped relationship instead exists between the number of administrative staff within a university and the rate of establishment of non-technology spin-offs. When the level of administrative staff is too low or too high relative to the fitted amount estimated using several university-level factors, academic staff reacts by establishing firms to achieve improved cash and human resource management.

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Notes

  1. In Italy, independent innovative companies that are <4 years old can register as ‘startup innovative’ and, thereby, be entitled to a series of benefits, such as tax credits, flexible labor arrangements, and easier access to financial instruments (e.g. Law 221/2012).

  2. For a more detailed description of this dataset, see Horta et al. (2015) and Vismara and Meoli (2015).

  3. Technical staff might indeed support technology spin-offs but may hardly benefit non-technology ones. Therefore, coherently with our first hypothesis, an increase in the level of administrative (including technical staff) support positively affects the rate of creation of technology academic spin-offs.

  4. The results of this estimation are reported in the first column of Table 1.

  5. For instance, the size of the TTOs does not vary significantly over time. Therefore, we treat this factor as a control variable rather than as an alternative for our main variable in the paper.

  6. Although a number of papers control for both the presence and the size of the TTO, we prefer to drop the first variable. Although only 66 out of 85 Italian universities report the activity of a proper TTO on their Internet size, in practice all of them link this activity to some other office, potentially biasing the effect of such a variable. Our variable, TTO size, accounts for the staff dedicated to technology transfer activity.

  7. This model is specified by eliminating some variables from the previous list because the fit either perfectly or are almost collinear with the fixed effects. These variables are university age, TTO size, private university, and macro-region dummies.

  8. Non-technology spin-offs are eliminated from these robustness tests because the limited number of spin-offs in the two subsamples does not allow for the convergence of model estimates.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo, Via Pasubio 7b, 24044, Dalmine, BG, Italy

    Michele Meoli & Silvio Vismara

  2. CCSE, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Michele Meoli & Silvio Vismara

  3. CCSE, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

    Michele Meoli & Silvio Vismara

Authors
  1. Michele Meoli
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  2. Silvio Vismara
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Correspondence to Michele Meoli.

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Table 6 Correlation matrix
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Meoli, M., Vismara, S. University support and the creation of technology and non-technology academic spin-offs. Small Bus Econ 47, 345–362 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-016-9721-1

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