university spin-offs

Over the past three decades, universities in industrialized countries have become increasingly active as venture capital financiers. Here, we analyze if investments in university-affiliated portfolio companies, in the form of an institutional-personal relation between the university and the founders, are a commercially successful investment proposition. We use a hand-collected data set of 706 university portfolio companies in the United States and the United Kingdom to extend previous case-based evidence that investments in faculty- and student-led start-ups are an elusive promise that rarely pays off commercially.
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