The Growth of Research-Based Spin-Offs: Unleashing the Value of Academic Entrepreneurship

Summary of the thesis Research-based spin-off companies (RBSOs) are considered to be a source of significant wealth creation, and an important mechanism for transferring scientific knowledge, technologies, and inventions from universities to industry. However, most existing research into RBSOs pay limited attention to the growth and outcomes of these firms. Further, some studies claim that most RBSOs remain small, achieve negligible growth, and deliver limited economic impact. Our knowledge into the growth and impact of such ventures remains fragmented and lack robust theoretical foundations. This motivates the dissertation’s overall research question: “How do research-based spin-offs develop, grow, and perform?” This dissertation pursues two objectives. From a practical perspective, it aims to elucidate how RBSOs transform scientific research into commercial products. From a theoretical perspective, it seeks to increase our conceptual understanding of how RBSOs grow. The research question is addressed through five research papers and an overarching cover essay. The empirical research follows a mixed method approach which combine both quantitative and qualitative research designs. A comprehensive database was developed which longitudinally track the national population of all Norwegian RBSOs established in the 1999-2011 period. The unique database comprises 373 RBSOs, and was developed by integrating a range of high-quality archival data sources with manually coded data. A multiple case study of nine trade sales in the RBSO population was also conducted. The research results advance new insights into the complex and heterogeneous growth processes, mechanisms, and outcomes that RBSOs pursue to overcome technological, market, and organizational uncertainty. The research demonstrates that growth follow highly skewed distributions, and that successful commercialization need long time to materialize. Further, growth is shown to be primarily discontinuous and shaped by firm breakthroughs. Finally, the dissertation shows that trade sales is a frequent venture outcome, which has been largely ignored in the existing literature. Results points to the tendency of promising firms to be acquired while still being small and unprofitable. Hence, trade sales can be understood as a distinct mechanism of growth used by RBSOs to fulfil commercialization processes. Besides theoretical development, the dissertation provides a number of important implications for entrepreneurs, public research organizations and policymakers