How do university spin-offs apply stakeholder management in practice?

This paper aims to better understand the application of stakeholder management within the university spin-offs (USOs) of the five Flemish universities (Belgium). Every organization, including USOs, must deal with different types of stakeholders. Even though a lot of research on USOs exists, as far as we know, no previous research has been performed on how USOs manage their stakeholders. For this qualitative research, 30 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with executives from USOs to understand how they define, categorize, and manage their stakeholders. Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 on their stakeholder management is examined and an overview is conducted of the stakeholders in each development phase of the USOs. Based on these interviews, we found that stakeholder management is mostly performed in a more intuitive way. However, it is shown that stakeholder management becomes more important as the USO moves along the company life cycle.