Spin-Off Entrepreneurship

One of the most important roles that are attributed to newly founded firms is the commercialisation of new technologies and services. The ideas for these innovations are often developed during academic or industrial research. Spin-offs are a vehicle to transfer these ideas into marketableproducts and services. They therefore assume a special position among firm foundations.

The aim of this workshop is to discuss recent scientific contributions that deal with new firms founded as spin-offs. We want to consider both spin-offs from universities and other research institutions (academic spin-offs) and spin-offs from already established firms (corporate spin-offs, employee spin-offs, entrepreneurial spin-offs). This offers the possibility to compare the characteristics and the relevance of these different types of spin-offs.

Topics of Interest

• The nature of knowledge and technology transfer of spin-offs
• Performance of spin-offs
• Driving factors of spin-off formation
• The composition of spin-offs’ entrepreneurial teams and team development
• Long-term relationship between spin-offs and incubators
• The dependence of spin-offs’ formation process on intellectual property rights
• The influence of governmental support programmes on the formation and the development of academic spin-offs
• Trigger to start a corporate spin-off within the incubator firm (changes in leadership, mergers and acquisitions)
• The role of spin-offs in the formation of regional clusters
• Similarities and differences between academic and corporate spin-offs