Exploring the Characteristics of Public Research Spinoff Founders: Evidence from the Bologna Area

Academic spinoffs, as said at the beginning of chapter 1, have been largely studied, as well as private start ups. Some studies regarding academic spinoffs have been focused especially on factors relative to individuals such as the analysis of institutional networks (Grandi & Grimaldi, 2003; Degroof & Roberts, 2004) or some also have focused on the social capital dimensions (Louis & Blumental, 1989). On the other side, some others have concentrated only on external factors, such government policies supporting the creation of spinoffs, or local context and infrastructures (Roberts & Malone, 1995). Few studies have tried to create an integrated framework for academic entrepreneurship encompassing individually related and external factors. One of these few is represented by the work of Fini, Grimaldi & Sobrero (2006).

This thesis will concentrate on internal and external features affecting public research entrepreneurship, through the analysis of face to face interviews with its founders. Interviews have been carried out on the area of Bologna, that is one of the areas with the highest public research spinoff concetration. The importance of founders’ point of view has often been underestimated, in fact similar works are not many. Researches through face to face interviews are quite an arduos task to carry out, but provide more reliable results. But, in order to better understand the analysis of results, that will be proposed in the following chapters, in the second chapter scientific work on factors affecting entrepreneurship will be presented.

Recently, several scholars have often focused on macrolevel environmental forces and on charachteristics of entrepreneurial oportunities, in order to understand the dynamics of entrepreneurship and to create a theorical framework. In contrast, other authors argue that the focus of investigation should be features related to individuals.

In the last decade in particular two scholars have argued that entrepreneurial success relies largely on macrolevel environmental forces influencing the foundings of firms (Aldrich, 2000) and on the charachteristics of entrepreneurial opportunities (Christiansen, 1997). Those researchers have greatly enhanced the understanding of entrepreneurial activity, but they do completely ignore (or at least greatly underestimate) the role of human motivation in entrepreneurship.

On the other side, a different school of thought, is represented by those such as Lumpkin & Dess, Wiklund, Gartner, Covin & Slevin, inspired by Miller’s works, have developped the theory that entrepreneurial success can be predicted by psychological traits of the entrepreneur, at least in small firms. Within this current of studies two important concepts have been highlighted: entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and entrepreneurial behaviour (EB). These two concept have often been misunderstood by scholars The entrepreneurial orientation can be defined as the “CEO’s strategic orientation reflecting a willingness of a firm to engage in entrepreneurial behaviours” (Wiklund, 1999). The entrepreneurial behaviour is defined in this thesis as “the performing behavior that indicates a dediction to the physical creation of a business venture”.

Given the choice of concentrating the analysis of this paper on public research entrepreneurship, a precise definition of what an entrepreneur is must be provided, too. The first scholar to develop studies of entrepreneursip was Joseph Schumpeter, who is considered the father of research in the field of entrepreneurship. In his first thesis he stated that the entrepreneurs are “individuals … who make things work in the economy of the country”. Schumpeter grew up in the stimulating atmosphere of fin de siècle Vienna, where he encountered other important personalities of the turn of the nineteenth century such as Freud, Klimt and Schoenberg. Schumpeter is also credited with many significant developments in economic theory, including the notion of "perfect competition" in an infinite marketplace. More to the point with reference to the topic of this chapter, Schumpeter's (1912) Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (or The Theory of Economic Development) directed the attention of his contemporary economists away from static systems and toward economic advancement. In this book, entrepreneurship, which Schumpeter considered to be extremely difficult, is described as the fundamental engine of economic development. The innovation of entrepreneurship allows economic systems to avert repetition and progress to more advanced states. A famous sentence of Schumpeter referring to entrepreneurship is: "without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns and no capitalist propulsion".

Taking this into consideration, the definition of entrepreneur which will be used in this paper is: “entrepreneurs are those who create a new organization to pursue an opportunity, drawing on individual skills, by devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the accompanying financial, physics and social risks, and receiving the resulting rewards of monetary and personal satisfacion”, Fini (2006); slightly modified from Hirish & Peters (1989); Begley (1995); Collins et al (2004).