IP Strategies in Academic and Corporate Spin-Offs: a theoretical framework

Literature highlights substantial differences between Academic Spin-Offs (ASOs) and Corporate Spin-Offs (CSOs), considering their characteristics as some of the causes that could affect their growth capacity along the time. Most of the studies refer to various factors like the entrepreneurial attitude, education, efficacy of technology transfer services and, just in few cases, realizing a comparison among ASOs and CSOs dimension and competitiveness. Focusing on factors related to Intellectual Property (IP) rights, this paper gives a contribution in defining a theoretical framework useful to highlight the main differences between ASOs and CSOs, identifying the impact of these differences on their growth rates. In particular, the paper describes the technology exploitation process used by Academic and Corporate Spin-Offs, extracting “phases” and “IP strategies” adopted in both cases. The framework contributes to demonstrate if and how different IP strategies implemented by ASOs and CSOs have an effect on their growth rate, in the attempt to support or not a recent point of view of some scholars that observe higher success rates in independent companies compared to academic ones.