Evaluating policies for innovation and university-firm relations. An investigation on the attitude of Italian academic entrepreneurs towards collaborations with firms

The paper is the first step of an analysis of the university-firm technology transfer mechanisms in a perspective of evaluation of innovation supporting policies. In particular, this work presents the results of the construction of an original database and of the preliminary study of individual behaviours with regards to the transfer of knowledge between universities and firms. The research questions underlying this work and the future research agenda are the following: "what would have happened had the spin-off not been created? Which other technology transfer channels would have been activated by the same academics?". These questions arise from the consideration that the existing literature seems to widely neglect the issue of possible trade-off effects among the different forms of technology transfer. Consequently, the final net impacts that can derive from the promotion of spin off supporting policies instead of policies favouring other forms of technology transfer are not considered. The empirical analysis presented in this work is based on the population of Italian spin-offs set-up between 2002 and 2007, for each of which societal data have been collected. Once selected the academic co-founders, we have then retraced their academic position at the date of the spin-off establishment, as well as four years before and four years after and we have studied the number and features of their publications and patents. First results show that it is possible to identify very different behaviours among scholars engaging in an entrepreneurial activity. Some of them show an increased propensity to collaborate with other firms after the establishment of the spin-off, while others, on the contrary, do not seem to change their co-publishing and co-patenting attitude, or they even decrease it, with a sort of "substitution effect". The study of the determinants of such heterogeneity becomes therefore essential in order to design effective policies supporting innovation and technology transfer.