How Do University Spin-Offs Apply Stakeholder Management in Practice?

Geoffrey Aerts () and Sophie Jacobs
Additional contact information
Geoffrey Aerts: Business Technology & Operations, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Sophie Jacobs: Business Technology & Operations, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Administrative Sciences, 2022, vol. 12, issue 4, 1-26

Abstract: This paper aims to better understand the application of stakeholder management within the university spin-offs (USOs) of the five Flemish universities (Belgium). Every organization, including USOs, must deal with different types of stakeholders. Even though a lot of research on USOs exists, as far as we know, no previous research has been performed on how USOs manage their stakeholders. For this qualitative research, 30 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with executives from USOs to understand how they define, categorize, and manage their stakeholders. Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 on their stakeholder management is examined and an overview is conducted of the stakeholders in each development phase of the USOs. Based on these interviews, we found that stakeholder management is mostly performed in a more intuitive way. However, it is shown that stakeholder management becomes more important as the USO moves along the company life cycle.

Keywords: stakeholder management; technology transfer; university spin-offs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/12/4/153/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/12/4/153/ (text/html)

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jadmsc:v:12:y:2022:i:4:p:153-:d:960186

Access Statistics for this article

Administrative Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Nancy Ma

More articles in Administrative Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().