Agency and similarity effects and the VC’s attitude towards academic spin-out investing

M. Knockaert (), Bart Clarysse, Mike Wright and A. Lockett
Additional contact information
A. Lockett: -

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: In this paper, we study which VC firm and investment manager related factors drive the VC’s attitude towards academic spin-out investing by taking an agency and human capital perspective. In order to do so, we use a unique hand-collected dataset involving 68 investment managers working at early stage VCs in Europe who were interviewed and provided us with information on the fund characteristics and their human capital. First, the results show that academic spin-out investors work to a large extent at publicly funded VCs that often engage in a very hands-on type of postinvestment behaviour. Second, the results show that human capital is associated with the willingness of the investment manager to invest in academic spin-outs. Investment managers that had worked in an academic environment and thus have similar human capital compared to the academic founders were more inclined to invest in academic spin-outs. Other specific human capital, such as technical education, and general human capital were not found to be associated with the investment manager’s interest in academic spin-out investing, except for the amount of entrepreneurial experience that negatively affected the attitude towards academic spin-outs.

Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ent, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_08_537.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Agency and similarity effects and the VC’s attitude towards academic spin-out investing (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:08/537

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nathalie Verhaeghe ().