Engagement of academics in university technology transfer: Opportunity and necessity academic entrepreneurship

Academic spinoffs are growingly considered a successful channel in transferring knowledge generated by the university and in fostering economic growth. Coherently, a wide range of policies has been implemented to encourage their formation in hopes of spurring innova- tion and local economic development. To be effective, however, policies need to consider the motivation leading to the establishment of academic spinoffs. In this paper, we link for the first time the literature on academic entrepreneurship to the debate on opportunity vs necessity entrepreneurship. By relying on a sample of 613 Italian academic spinoffs established over the period 2006–2012, we find that necessity-oriented academic spinoffs are associated with higher survival profiles, while opportunity-oriented spinoffs exhibit higher post-entry growth rates.