Do exploration and exploitation in university research drive early-stage equity financing of university spin-offs?

Davide Hahn (), Tommaso Minola, Silvio Vismara and Daniel Agyare
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Davide Hahn: University of Bergamo
Tommaso Minola: University of Bergamo
Silvio Vismara: University of Bergamo
Daniel Agyare: University of Bergamo

Small Business Economics, 2024, vol. 63, issue 2, No 5, 627-653

Abstract: Abstract An emerging theme in the entrepreneurial university (EU) literature is how universities should evolve to best reconcile their different missions, particularly research and commercialization, which often require different sets of resources. This tension is evident in the development of university spin-offs (USOs). In particular, the EU literature has generally overlooked how characteristics of university research affect USO’s early-stage access to external equity. In this study, we embrace the characterization of university research offered by literature in terms of patterns, specifically, exploration and exploitation. Through the lens of the imprinting perspective, we study the effect of exploration and exploitation in university research on the early-stage equity financing of USOs on a unique dataset that covers a sample of 739 USOs from 39 Italian public universities founded from 2011 to 2019. Our results indicate that exploration (exploitation) in research has an overall positive (negative) impact on the likelihood of USOs obtaining early-stage external equity financing. Additionally, this exploratory study offers several conceptual and practical contributions to the EU literature.

Keywords: Early-stage equity financing; Entrepreneurial university; Exploration; Exploitation; Research patterns; University spin-offs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G30 I23 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11187-023-00862-3

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