The Development of University Spin-Offs: Bridging Founder Agency and Relationship Perspectives

This study addresses the creation of university spin-offs (USOs), research-based start-ups rooted in academic institutions. Research has shown that connecting with business actors is particularly challenging for start-ups because of the liabilities of newness and smallness, and this is especially true for USOs based on novel technologies. Within the IMP tradition, studies of new ventures have often used the three-settings framework to explain the difficulties that firms from a "developing setting" face when they interact with actors in the "producing" and "using" settings. Empirically, this literature has mostly examined spin-offs founded by academics with limited familiarity with business logics. This study takes a different perspective. It examines a case in which one of the two leading actors has more than twenty years of industry experience and is therefore strongly embedded in the relevant business context. Given the importance of context in entrepreneurial phenomena and the limited attention paid to the entrepreneur-founder in IMP research, the study asks: How are the creation and development of spin-offs with an industry-experienced founder shaped by individual trajectories and inter-organizational dynamics? The study aims to contribute to IMP research on entrepreneurship by showing how the founder's agency and the evolution of the spin-off's inter-organizational relationships interact to shape USO development.