Top management teams in academic entrepreneurship: A review of the literature

Research-based spin-offs have been hailed as the flagship mechanism for the transfer of inventions produced by public research organisations to industry. With the support of policy actions, in the last decade universities have generated high numbers of spin-offs, that – especially in Europe – have, however, achieved unsatisfactory performance. In this review, we investigate a generally under-researched topic in the field of academic entrepreneurship, namely the influence of founders, entrepreneurial and top management teams on the growth patterns of spin-offs. We identify 40 articles in the field of Economics and Management dealing with this subject. The analysis of these articles reveals six themes, on the basis of which we build a comprehensive model to interpret the phenomenon under investigation. In particular, we find that the role of top management teams is contingent on the stage of the life cycle and the environmental conditions of the firm; the process of team formation and change affects both the strategy of the firm and the types of resources needed for development. Performance emerges as a multidimensional concept that is affected by all the aforementioned variables. Finally, we find that decision making processes in academic spin-offs are seldom researched.

Keywords:

Academic spin-off , Technology transfer , Governance , Top management team , Entrepreneurship