Financing the Academic Spin-off companies: the role of Crowdfunding

Crowdsourcing is influencing innovation processes, linking together, providers and seekers of strategic resources. Knowledge-based resources have been the core of this movement, but financial-based resources are becoming a... [ view full abstract ]

Crowdsourcing is influencing innovation processes, linking together, providers and seekers of strategic resources. Knowledge-based resources have been the core of this movement, but financial-based resources are becoming a relevant aspect of Crowdsourcing, thanks to Crowdfunding. The authors focalize attention on the relation between crowdfunding and academia, especially looking at the perspective in attracting financial resources to jumpstart the TT processes and to exploit the entrepreneurial capabilities of researchers.
The proposed research model is an exploratory study to analyze the role of crowdfunding in financing academic spin-off. Following the evidence from the literature review, the authors aim to build a case study research (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2009) through the observation (Burgess, 2002) of some Italian Universities and Academic Spin-off behavior among different crowdfunding models and platforms. Because of the newness of the topic, the case study approach is expected to capture the complexity of the phenomenon. Through the analysis of collected data about spin-offs, authors would underline a relation between the crowdfunding financing potentiality and: the venture capital’s investment tendency and scientific ranking of new ventures board, as well as their academic reputation. Summarizing, the authors tries to understand if crowdfunding could be helpful in the raising of financial-based resources.