Shaping Academic Spin-Offs’ Performance Through Gender Diversity and Venture Capital: Some Evidence from Europe

Academic Spin-Off companies creation represents a valuable technology transfer channel through patent creation and commercialization and is considered to be one of the main tools for the exploitation of university research results. In this thesis, ASO Acquisition and Sales strategies have been considered as positive and significant post-entry performance, examining on one side how the governance gender structure impacts the ASO post-entry performance, on the other how Venture Capital influence ASOs growth strategy and facilitate firms’ acquisition. Much of the research available in the literature have focused on USA’s spin-offs, while this topic has not received sufficient attention for the European countries. Despite the well-recognized value of studying the Academic Spin-Offs phenomenon, empirical studies on this topic are continuously constrained by the limited availability of data (Shane, 2004). Therefore, a comprehensive and organic database providing data from different national and EU level ASO records is not currently available. Only few country level data are available. For this reason, I collected data from different sources and I built a new macro-level academic spin-offs database, based on information of European spin-off companies. Hence, this study is unique because it draws on a macro-level database, based on three different European countries over a 10 years period and data have been collected in several stages. The final comprehensive dataset includes time-variant information from 2009 to 2018 of almost 2.000 spin-off companies at European, national and regional level.