Towards a Theory of Non-Economic Goals in Academic Spin-Offs: Conceptualization and Policy Implications

Academic spinoffs (ASOs) represent one science commercialization mechanism that has attracted particular attention from scholars and policymakers for its potential impact on society. It is widely acknowledged that the embeddedness of ASO founders in academia represents a distinctive feature of these firms, which uniquely affects their development. At the individual-level, we know that founders of ASOs display non-monetary motives derived from the academic setting (e.g., prestige, curiosity-driven problem solving) that drive academics’ decision to create ASOs as well as their underlying definition of success. However, at the firm-level, we know little about how ASOs include such non-economic motives in their post-founding decision making. Empirical literature in this respect is scarce and fragmented and focuses mostly on the founding decision of the individual academics rather than on the post-founding decision making of ASO firms. A reason for such gap is the surprising absence of a conceptualization of non-economic goals in ASO. Therefore, we build on the organizational goals and family firm literatures to conceptualize the distinctive nature of non-economic goals in ASOs and argue how these goals can uniquely shape these organizations’ post-founding decision-making. Further, we show how our theoretical model can help solving some existing empirical puzzles in the literature and better understanding crucial decisions of ASOs, such as team composition and dynamics, exit decisions and strategic choices. In doing so, our model not only sheds light on the uniqueness of ASO vis à vis other young technology-based firms. It also explains the heterogeneity among ASOs’ post-founding decisions. On this basis of this model, we assess whether and how different national policies take into consideration the non-economic goals of ASOs, for example in defining incentives and metrics. Departing from this systematic assessment, we propose a set of recommendations to align policies to the uniqueness of ASOs goal-setting.