On the knowledge context of innovative startups: technological endowments and performance of corporate and university spinoffs.

Research has highlighted performance differences between CSOs and USOs (i.e., innovative startups which take advantage respectively of incumbent firms and public research labs as sources of their technological knowledge), but less is known on how the specific characteristics of the technological knowledge commercialized by spinoffs contributes to explain the performance differences between USOs and CSOs. In order to advance this literature, our study conceptualizes and tests a model in which the characteristics of innovative startups’ technological knowledge mediate the relationship between venture’s source of knowledge and commercialization performance. We test our framework on sample constituted by 268 CSOs and 106 USOs, surveyed in 2015 and representative of the sample of the cohort of Italian innovative startups founded in 2014. Results show that USOs outperform CSOs in term of profitability because of the newness and the variety of applications of their technological base. Contribution to research on innovative startups and knowledge spillovers are illustrated.