An empirical analysis of the relationship between university investments in the Technology Transfer Offices and academic spin-offs.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the role of Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) in promoting the creation of academic spin-offs and contributing to their performance. Specifically, it aims to identify the relationship between the resources invested in TTOs and the creation and growth of academic spin-offs. The empirical analysis refers to Italy, where a law passed in 1999 allowed academicians to be actively involved in newly-established companies for the ‘industrial use of research’. Even if spin-offs existed, de factu, before 1999, since then, almost all Public Research Institutions (PRIs) have developed specific regulations for the creation of academic spin-offs and provided resources to promote and support them. We used the data on the flow of academic spin-offs and resources invested in TTOs in Italian universities during the period 2002-2010 to investigate if and how investments in TTOs contributed to the set-up and performance of spin-offs. The results of the empirical analysis show that in a first phase academicians reacted more readily than universities to the opportunity offered by the new legislation, which may in part be due to the organizational rigidity that characterizes PRIs in Italy. However, the empirical analysis also shows that after this initial phase the size of the TTO (in terms of employees), which is the result of investments by the university, has a positive influence on the number of spin-offs set up by universities. However, we found no relationship between the resources invested in TTOs and the performance of spin-offs, which probably depends more dependent from both long term investments in research and the (economic) characteristics of external environment in which the university is located.