The university-level and local context-level fostering factors of academic spin-offs success performance. The Italian case

Can the contextual environment where academic spin-offs operate affect their success performance and contribute to their development? Is there a difference between the several contextual levels in fostering the academic entrepreneurship processes? In this paper we have tried to answer these very relevant questions through an empirical analysis performed on a sample of 405 companies spun off from Italian universities and extracted from Netval database in 2013. More specifically, the paper goal is to explore the success determinants of academic spin-offs in Italy from a dual level of analysis: the university level and the local context level. Starting from the Resource-Based View Theory and the Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship, we estimated a model to evaluate the impact of the two-level contextual supporting factors of entrepreneurship on academic spin-off performance. Our results showed that academic spin-off success is significantly and positively associated with university-funded research and public funded research, thus emphasizing the relevant role of research and development resources provided by universities and local contexts in contributing to knowledge spillover. The negligible contribution of the remaining contextual variables to the academic entrepreneurship performance, both at university and local context levels, can be likely due to the mediating role played by university in achieving the academic spin- off success that absorbs the direct effects of the fostering factors of entrepreneurship.