University start-up formation and technology licensing with firms that go public: a resource-based view of academic entrepreneurship

Although academic entrepreneurship is a topic receiving some attention in the literature, higher education's appetite for expanding technology transfer activities suggests that more research is needed to inform practice. This study investigates the effects of particular resource sets on two university commercialization activities: the number of start-up companies formed and the number of initial public offering (IPO) firms to which a university had previously licensed a technology. Utilizing multisource data on 120 universities and a resource-based view of the firm framework, a set of university financial, human capital, and organizational resources were found to be significant predictors of one or both outcomes.