Tasas de Reemplazo (TR)

Taking a bird-eye look to the existing literature it is clear that there is not a universally accepted definition for academic spin-off. Journal articles present slight differences on what is and is not considered an Academic Spin-Off (ASO) (see Beraza

& Rodríguez, 2012 for a literature review on ASO conceptualization).

Simply stated an academic spin-off is a new company that surge from the university.

However this simple definition brings some doubts about to what is and what is not considered an academic spin-off. We will establish what are the characteristics and definition of a standard company spin-off and then will go for the term academic as a special type of spin-off.

A spin-off is a term used in Corporate Finance to explain the process of creation of a new company, with autonomous governance, from a parent company with some assets and/or human resources that are transferred. The parent company holds equity of the new company and no cash payment takes place in the process. The adjective sponsored or voluntary spin-off is often used to differentiate it to the situation where a group of shareholders or an external group force the division of the company. Thus, in a sponsored spin-off, the parent firm voluntarily establishes and holds stock in a newly formed company, which intends to perform some of the business of the sponsoring firm (Dahlstrand, 1997).

When the term academic or university is added to spin-off it seems like the initial condition of the parent company retaining a significant equity portion is lost. Thus, the common definition of Academic Spin-Off in literature does not require the University to hold stock in the company. In contrast, Corporate Finance refers to a narrow or pure concept of spin-off: ownership of the parent company and assets (knowledge and tangible assets) transferred from parent company to spin-off. As we will see, these

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differences will have implications for research and will help us to understand and benchmark the differences between Corporate Spin-off (CSO) and Academic Spin-off (ASO).

Other questions that have generated controversy in literature are i) the involvement of the academic in the company, ii) the type of technology to be transferred and iii) the purity in the academic background of the entrepreneur.

The issue of who is currently running the new company also brings controversy.

Whereas in the Corporate Finance view is commonly understood that top management team comes from the parent company, when this group or individual get shares of the spun-off firm we are talking about an Entrepreneurial Spin-Off (ESO) (Lindholm,1997a).

However, the first definitions of ASO were restrictive and required an academic to move from the University to the company (McQueen & Wallmark, 1982; Smilor, et al., 1990). This question of being the academic the one who is actually the entrepreneur was promptly surpassed by scholars (Nicolaou & Birley 2003; Klofsten & Jones-Evans, 2000) so that currently, being a shareholder or working at the company it is not considered by most authors as a key point in order to consider the new company an academic spin-off. Thus, for an ASO to be considered, the academics not always take part of the TMT, or the company board, and not always hold stock of the spun-off firm.

Consequently, the sole condition to accomplish to be a spin-off in this context is the transfer of some rights, patents, knowledge, or any other output produced by research from the parent institution to the new firm. Again, the type of knowledge transferred has not had a unique interpretation. The Association of University Technology Managers (2002) labelled as “spin-offs” those companies that had received a formal transfer of technology, while the other ones were “start-ups”. Formal meant it had to be any kind of license relationship with the parent organisation (equity, contract), which will imply in most cases, an IP protected, codified technology.

Scholars have argued this restrictive definition for ASO. It is common that the knowledge transferred from University is tacit, but this kind of companies does have a

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technology base from University and would not have existed without the university linkages (Bathelt, Kogler & Munro, 2010). Besides they represent a significant part of the ASO/start-up universe (around half in Bathelt study). So, to overlook this group would eliminate a significant group of university firms, which can provide interesting insights in how Entrepreneurial University can benefit local economies.

The other term that requires explanation is “academic”, as some authors differentiate Universities from other Public Research Institutions (PRI) like, technical schools, private R&D departments, large national laboratories and research institutes that create research based spin-offs (RBSO). It also can be differentiated the broader term University from Academic. University spin-off (USO) relates to either the academics, like assistants, researchers and doctoral students (ASO) or even the students (SSO) as promoters of the spin-off (Pirnay, Surlemont & Nlemvo, 2003). ASO is considered to be the genuine spin-off from university because entrepreneurs have a profound technical and research asset that is the base of the spin-off whereas in spin-off promoted by students Technology Transfer has a secondary role, remaining as a simple exploitation of a business opportunity. However, some authors have recently provided evidence that puts in question this last statement showing that companies founded by graduate students are also high quality (Åstebro, Bazzazian & Braguinsky, 2010), and ASO literature systematically forgets about this great flow of Technology Transfer and Economic Development from University. Thus, USO definition is extraordinary heterogeneous and its status depends on the perception of practitioners and academics and consequently can vary considerably. In Figure 2, we try to synthesize these different views of academic spin-off.

Some authors prefer to quit of the “academic” component and talk about Research Based Spin-Off (RBSO), implicitly focusing in the Technology Transfer component of the company as the main characteristic to define it, rather than the entrepreneur’s origin (Mustar et al., 2006).

In line with the latest ASO conception, we adopt a broad definition of Academic Spin-Off, and we take into consideration Pirnay et al. (2003:p.356) definition of ASO:

“new firms created to exploit commercially some knowledge, technology or research results developed within a university”.

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These different interpretations are a dangerous obstacle to scientific rigour when it is time to delimitate the boundaries and the content of each study and lead to a research field where comparing results, generalization and drawing conclusions has an added difficulty and weakens the productivity of the whole area of study.