Success factors of university-spin-offs: Regional government support programs versus regional environment

•A comparative empirical approach using multivariate techniques is proposed.•Different regional environments show a valid impact on spin-off performance.•Public funding does not lead to better spin-off performance.•Programs to support university spin-offs should consider the specific local context.

In recent years entrepreneurship research has increasingly interpreted new firm emergence in the light of the context the potential or real founder is living and working in. This is especially true for university spin-offs, a type of new firms that gives rise to great hopes for policymakers and technology transfer institutions. The aim of this paper is to analyze what is more influential: specific characteristics of the regional environment of the spin-off founder or public programs to support university spin-offs. Based upon a unique data set covering 11 years of data collection we were able to apply a control group approach with two different government support programs in two regional contexts. The results based upon ordinal regressions suggest that the regional context in which an individual starts a firm, has an impact on start-up success, but the fact that he/she had received government support has a lesser impact. To summarize: site specific factors matter, government support programs per se do not.