ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the environment and the university spin-off creation, and its developmental early stages in promoting and sustaining the new company. Thus, academic spin-offs in an urban context contribute to a city's qualification as innovative. Universities provide the elements to sustain the innovative city with a direct impact on local development. Universities in a metropolitan area participate in a network of innovation by the formation of academic spin-offs in technologically unrelated industries, then provide technological diversity to the innovative network. University spin-offs also include new companies that were formed to commercialize a university technology and/or the knowledge developed within an academic institution, or that received some kind of support from the parent university. Greater Boston is home to one of the largest concentrations of colleges and universities, including world-renowned institutions regularly at the top of universities rankings: Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
