University Startups and Entrepreneurship: New Data, New Results

This paper empirically examines commercialization of university faculty inventions through startup firms from 1994 through 2008. Using data from the Association of University Technology Managers and the 2010 NRC doctoral rankings, our research reveals several findings. We find that university entrepreneurship is more common in bad economic times and that engineering department quality and biological sciences department size are more important after the NASDAQ stock market crash in 2000. We also find that the quality of a biological sciences department is positively associated with startup company activity. Conditional on creating one startup, each additional TTO employee significantly increases university startups.