The influence of scientific prestige and peer effects on the intention to create university spin-offs
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The influence of scientific prestige and peer effects on the intention to create university spin‑offs Stefan Houweling1 · Sven Wolff2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Star scientists played a major role in the founding and establishment of the biotech industry. But while numerous biotech spin-offs have been created in the U.S., few have been established in Europe, despite research in biotech and the presence of star scientists. In addition to the prestige of a researcher, we would therefore like to examine the importance of university culture and peer effects for the intention to create a spin-off. Because of the inadequacy of existing prestige indices, we created a new index to measure the prestige of scientists for our analysis. With data from 533 German and Swiss scientists in the life sciences, we will show that, besides other variables, prestige and peer effects influence the intention to create a university spin-off. Keywords Scientific prestige · University spin-offs · Peer effects JEL Classification I23 · L65 · O31 · O33
1 Introduction The 1980 Bayh–Dole Act in the U.S. was the starting signal for a new mode of academic commercial activity. This legislation provided scientists with more opportunities to participate in the commercial success of their own inventions and research (Thursby et al. 2001). Although university science has been commercialized since there were universities, the Bayh–Dole Act was specifically designed to foster those activities (Audretsch 2014). Emerging from the U.S., new policies spread to the countries of the so-called western world, which more or less adopted the general spirit of the Bayh–Dole Act. Many universities established policies designated to foster scientists’ commercial activities, such as the creation of university spin-offs, and spillovers from universities into industry. While university spin-offs and collaboration with industry have been an important factor in technological process before, for example, in the founding of Silicon Valley or Route 128 in * Stefan Houweling [email protected]‑uas.de Sven Wolff sven.wolff@uni‑siegen.de 1
Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Nibelungenplatz 1, 60318 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
2
Chair for Entrepreneurship and Family Business, Siegen University, Siegen, Germany
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the U.S., the biotech revolution created a whole new industrial sector, mainly derived from university spin-offs. Although the success of these policies has been very different from country to country, these policy changes prepared the ground for certain scientists to commercialize their research highly effectively (Karlsson and Wigren 2012). The biotech industry is one of the most recent examples of the influence of academic science on industry. While in mature industries, new innovations are often created by firms themselves, the biotech industry almost completely originated from academic science. Although the modern biotech industry has advanced beyond
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