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2022 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

7. The Relationship between University Management Practices and the Growth of Academic Spin-Offs

verfasst von : Mario Benassi, Matteo Landoni, Francesco Rentocchini

Erschienen in: University-Industry Knowledge Interactions

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

There is a paucity of studies which have analysed the role of internal processes for academic spin-offs in a systematic way. We focus on a specific nuance of internal processes which relate to the management practices that universities can put in place to influence the growth of academic spin-offs. Building upon recent literature on the empirical economics of management, we investigate whether and how different forms of management practices contribute to the growth of academic spin-offs. We collect survey data on universities’ management practices by focusing on technology transfer offices, as well as drawing on a longitudinal sample of 790 Italian university spin-offs founded by 42 different Italian universities, which were observed over the period of 2006 to 2014. Our findings show that management practices help to explain the growth of academic spin-offs, although their effect varies across management practices. Supporting operations in the form of patenting and training as well as the existence of incentives are found to have a positive association with spin-off growth. A negative association is instead found for target setting (spin-off growth targets) and hiring of external management with private sector experience. We provide an explanation of these results by pointing to a combination of adverse selection, short-termism and weak enforceability by universities. Drawing on our results, the adoption of management practices by university managers and policy makers should be carefully considered, as they might have unintended consequences on the growth of academic spin-offs.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Determinants of Contract Renewals in University–Industry Contract Research: Going my Way, or Good Sam?

Nächstes Kapitel Public Research Organizations and Technology Transfer: Flexibility, Spatial Organization and Specialization of Research Units

We adopt this last definition in accordance with the report of Netval, the Italian association for the valorisation of results from public research (Ramacciotti & Daniele, 2015).

Management practices should not be confused with managerial capital, which refers mainly to the talent and skills of individuals (such as a manager) and comes as the aggregation of individual contributions but lacks an organisational dimension (Bertrand & Schoar, 2003).

Building upon the definition provided by NETVAL (Muscio et al., 2016) and adopted by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of the University (ANVUR), Spinoff Italia defines a company an academic spin-off if it satisfies one of the following conditions: (i) Italian university holds a share of the company; (ii) at least one member of the founding team is a tenured member of staff of a university.

Unfortunately, the data does not allow to distinguish exit by acquisition from exit by end of operations (i.e. bankruptcy) thus making the option of measuring performance by firm death unfeasible in the present case.

It is critical to point out that faculty reporting on third stream activities is mandatory in the Italian higher education system. Notably, all contractual arrangements should be directly reported to the university central services and TTOs. Failing to report on contracting arrangements on the side of the faculty would be considered as illegal in the Italian higher education system. Therefore, the data collected is liable to be a very accurate and comprehensive.

Data on the number of patents, the amount of research funding and contract research comes from the Italian National Research Assessment (VQR 2004–2010) and refers to the period 2004–2010. Information on the size of universities comes from the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) and refers to period 2006–2014.

Our starting point was the 1226 academic spin-offs contained in Spinoff Italia. The final number of unique companies was reduced to 790 for two reasons: (1) we were not able to match information from AIDA for 181 companies and (2) we did not obtain responses to our survey from 22 universities which generated 255 spin-offs over the period under consideration.

To obtain real turnover, gross turnover has been deflated by adopting the ratio of current prices to chained-linked prices (reference year 2010) at the higher level of disaggregation, as provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) at the NACE rev. 2 2-digit industrial level.

As further robustness check, we have also run the analysis by bootstrapping standard errors with 1000 replications. Results do not differ from those presented in the main text and are available from the authors upon request.

We run a number of robustness checks to evaluate the robustness of results from factor analyses for the first two sets of explanatory variables (support operations and target management). First, we adopted different methods of factor extraction – principal components, iterated principal factors and maximum likelihood – which yield consistent results. We further test the robustness of the factor analyses by running them with a polychoric correlation matrix, which has been shown to be more appropriate with ordinal variables (Flora and Curran, 2004). Finally, we included in the regressions the average value of the items entering each factor instead of the predicted factor. The results are robust to all these specifications and are available from the authors upon request.

We are unable to include fixed effects in our regressions as our core explanatory variables (management practices) are time invariant, nevertheless we believe that the rich set of variables described in this section would contribute to control for the influence of intra-firm strategies and capabilities.

We do not have information on the amount of venture capital obtained by the firm. Although venture capital has been shown to explain spin-offs’ growth in a large number of contexts, this does not necessarily apply to the Italian case where venture capitalists play a minor role. For example, Bolzani et al., (2014) show that VC-backed academic spin-offs in Italy have been around the 1% of the total over the period 2003–2013. Even more interestingly, the average nominal equity invested by VCs has been less than 1 million euros over the period 2010–2013.

Investments are measured in millions of euros and deflated by adopting the ratio of current prices to chained-linked prices (reference year 2010) at the NACE rev. 2 2-digit industry level, as provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) The investments have later been transformed into stocks. We adopt the standard approach found in the relevant literature and calculate it using the following formula: K_t = K_t − 1(1 − δ) + P_t where K_t − 1 is the stock of capital at year t − 1, δ is the depreciation rate assumed at 5%, and P_t is the investment in year t.

HH index is the sum of the square of the turnover shares of firms operating in (NACE Rev.2) industries. University size is measured by the number of tenured professors per university because, owing to the data sources used, only they held relevance for spin-off establishment in our study (please refer to the definition of academic spin-off reported in footnote 2).

We have also tried to include a number of controls at the TTO level (e.g. TTO’s age and size) but they do not contribute to explain academic spin-offs’ growth. Consequently, we do not include these variables in our estimates on the ground of parsimony.

The persistency of management practices for academic spin-offs has also been confirmed by introductory semi-structured interviews we had with 6 heads of TTOs before starting with the large-scale survey. Several interviewees stressed how the Italian university system has been historically characterised by a slow process of adaptation to the university-industry practices of other European countries and that the support and practices for academic spin-offs do not represent an exception to this general trend.

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Titel: The Relationship between University Management Practices and the Growth of Academic Spin-Offs
verfasst von: Mario Benassi
Matteo Landoni
Francesco Rentocchini
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: University-Industry Knowledge Interactions
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84668-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-84669-5

Copyright-Jahr: 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84669-5_7

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