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What are the trade-offs of academic entrepreneurship? An investigation on the Italian case

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Abstract

This study addresses the following research questions: what happens to the propensity to collaborate with other firms, once the researcher creates her own venture? Do her collaborations decrease or do they grow? These questions have been overlooked by the current literature, even though they carry important policy implications. Our key suggestion is that the effectiveness of a technology transfer tool can be better assessed by taking into account the possible crowding-out effects with other channels of knowledge transfer. We do so for Italy, by comparing the behavior of single researchers, before and after the establishment of their own firm, with the behavior of a control group. We assess whether those academics that founded their own firm significantly change their attitude to perform research collaborations with other firms by means of co-publication and co-patenting. We also verify whether creating a firm has an impact on the overall patenting and publication performance. Our results suggest that there is a negative effect on the overall publishing performance, while the patenting activity does not change significantly. Regarding co-publications, our results confirm the existence of a substitution effect between spin-offs and co-publication with firms, while we observe an increase in the case of co-patenting. A closer look at the data, however, suggests that the latter is mainly triggered by the patenting activity that the researcher performs with his or her own company.

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Source: authors’ elaboration

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Notes

  1. For a review of contributions on the topic see Rothaemel et al. 2007.

  2. To our knowledge, one exception is the study of Van Looy et al. (2011), which looks at the trade offs between different forms of technology transfer. The analysis is however carried out at the university level and not in a quasi-experimental setting.

  3. This negative effect can also been explained by the fact that publications are typically not a priority output for firms. Furthermore, academics engaged in commercialization activities tend to delay the publication of research results, withhold data and limit the access to research materials (see Larsen 2011 for further details).

  4. The initial database is publicly accessible at: www.spin-offitalia.it. It contains data for the period 2000–2012 on the general characteristics of Italian spin-offs (name, year of foundation, university of foundation, sector of activity, location, etc.) and on their economic performance (sales, profits, employees, etc.). It also provides information on TTOs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Udine, Via Tomadini 30/a, 33100, Udine, Italy

    Elisa Barbieri

  2. University of Ferrara, Via Voltapaletto, 11, Ferrara, Italy

    Lauretta Rubini & Chiara Pollio

  3. Polytechnic University of Marche, Via Brecce Bianche 12, Ancona, Italy

    Alessandra Micozzi

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  1. Elisa Barbieri
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  2. Lauretta Rubini
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  4. Alessandra Micozzi
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Correspondence to Elisa Barbieri.

Appendix

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Table 8 Correlation among outcome variables
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Barbieri, E., Rubini, L., Pollio, C. et al. What are the trade-offs of academic entrepreneurship? An investigation on the Italian case. J Technol Transf 43, 198–221 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-016-9482-7

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