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The effect of university and regional knowledge spillovers on firms’ performance: an analysis of the Spanish USOs

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Abstract

Previous empirical studies of university spin-off (USO) growth have applied a firm-based approach without modelling how contextual factors may influence firm growth. By adopting an ‘interactionist approach’, this paper tests the hypothesis that the regional and university contexts may partly determine USO growth, together with firms’ internal resources. Using a sample of 531 Spanish USOs located in 16 Spanish regions and launched by 51 universities over the 2001–2013 and applying multilevel modelling with macro- and micro-data, the findings confirmed that regional context, together with firm-specific characteristics, are important for explaining USO growth. More specifically, the presence of venture capitalists, the capacity to generate internal funds, and operating in high-tech industries have a positive effect on USO growth. On the basis of the results, we propose some policies for fostering USO growth.

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Notes

  1. The random effects are assumed to be independent of one another and normally distributed with zero means and constant variances. For the residual errors, we assumed that they have a first-order autoregressive correlation structure, AR (1) (Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal 2012; Steele 2014). Under an AR (1) model var.(e ijk ) = σ2 e (constant) for all occasions i and cov(e ijk , e i’jk ) = σ2 e ρ|i − i’|, so corr(e ijk , e i’jk ) = ρ|i − i’|. Thus, the correlation between the responses at occasions i and i’ depends on the length of time between them, and is smaller the further apart occasions i and i’ are (Steele 2014).

  2. It should be noted that the value of L 1 is now the likelihood value for the two-level occasions-within-USO (Model 2) and differs to that used in the previous LR test. The value of L 2, on the other hand, is the same. As suggested by Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal (2012), we divide the p-value by two for testing one variance when another uncorrelated random effect is in the model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Finance and Accounting, University of Coruña, Campus Elviña, 15701, A Coruña, Spain

    María Jesús Rodríguez-Gulías

  2. Department of Finance and Accounting, University of Santiago de Compostela, Avda. do Burgo, s/n, 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    David Rodeiro-Pazos

  3. Department of Finance and Accounting, University of Santiago de Compostela, Avda. do Burgo, s/n, 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Sara Fernández-López

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  1. María Jesús Rodríguez-Gulías
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Correspondence to David Rodeiro-Pazos.

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Rodríguez-Gulías, M.J., Rodeiro-Pazos, D. & Fernández-López, S. The effect of university and regional knowledge spillovers on firms’ performance: an analysis of the Spanish USOs. Int Entrep Manag J 13, 191–209 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-016-0399-2

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