ABSTRACT
Academics who wish to commercialize university research are often presented with two choices: either license their technology to an existing company or start their own. Yet this dichotomy conceals the great diversity found among companies spinning out from universities, despite their common origin. Differences include their knowledge base, the activities they undertake, the development of their business models and the nature of their development experience. In the literature on spin-outs, typologies nevertheless often focus on generalized sequences of development and are underpinned by a linear conception of the creation and development of new companies. In contrast, the process of innovation is now widely accepted to be an iterative, non-linear process in which feedback loops modify developments. The same applies to entrepreneurial new firm creation. This chapter analyses university spin-outs as diverse undertakings involving a non-linear development process. The definition of spin-out has changed over time. The term was used until recently to refer to a company founded by members of a university department or originating in another company. In response to universities' increasing interest in the commercialization of research and changes in the availability of start-up capital, the term is increasingly used to refer to a start-up with a technology in which a university department has claim to the intellectual property, so making venture capital a possible source of funding. Shane (2004) has examined spin-outs in which MIT had intellectual property rights in order to ascertain the type of technologies exploited by academic spin-outs. These were found to be technologies that established firms were unlikely to license for a variety of reasons.
