Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/68605 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
ZEW Discussion Papers No. 13-004
Publisher: 
Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW), Mannheim
Abstract: 
The creation of spinoff companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. In the promotion process, policymakers typically treat these 'university' spinoffs like industry startups. However, when university spinoffs involve an employment transition by a researcher out of the not-for-profit sector, the creation of a university spinoff is likely to impose a higher social cost than the creation of an industry startup. To offset this higher social cost, university spinoffs must produce a larger stream of social benefits than industry startups, a performance premium. This paper outlines the arguments why the social costs of entrepreneurship are likely to be higher for academic entrepreneurs and empirically investigates the existence of a performance premium using a sample of German startup companies. We find that university spinoffs exhibit a performance premium of 3.4 percentage points higher employment growth over industry startups. The analysis also shows that the performance premium varies across types of academic entrepreneurs and founders' academic disciplines.
Subjects: 
Academic Entrepreneurship
Startups
Firm performance
Technology Transfer
Open Science
University Spinoff Policy
Human Capital
Social Capital
JEL: 
L25
L26
J24
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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