Exploring the Boundary between Entrepreneurship and Corporate Venturing: From Assisted Spin-outs to Entrepreneurial Spin-offs

E. van de Velde (), Bart Clarysse, Mike Wright, G. Rayp and J. Bruneel

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

Abstract: Corporate entrepreneurship and corporate spin-offs have gained importance over the last decades. Corporate spin-offs play an increasingly important role in the development and growth of emerging, high-technology industries, thereby contributing to economic growth. While previous studies on corporate spin-offs have taken the established firm as a point of departure, a central issue concerns the locus of entrepreneurs. We adopt a bottom-up approach by considering those spin-offs that are created by employees, based upon an opportunity spotted while working for the parent company. Based upon the knowledge-based theory of the firm and the literature on opportunity identification, we develop a typology of corporate spin-offs. We identified three types of corporate spin-offs: Assisted spin-outs, Restructuring-driven spin-outs and Entrepreneurial Spin-offs. These types of corporate spin-offs differ from each other in terms of nature and formality of knowledge transfer; detection and implementation of opportunity identification; and performance. Based upon an in-depth analysis of 41 corporate spin-offs in Flanders, we found that Entrepreneurial Spin-offs outperform both Assisted and Restructuring-driven spin-outs on all four performance indicators. Our findings imply that parent companies often miss possibilities to capture value from opportunities that were originally developed in the parent company.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent and nep-ino
Date: 2007-06

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.FEB.UGent.be/nl/Ondz/wp/Papers/wp_07_472.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:07/472

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.
Series data maintained by Nathalie Verhaeghe ().