Spin-off firms may be seen as a key mechanism for the external transmission of knowledge developed at universities. The proliferation of academic spin-offs in recent years has led universities to develop specific rules for the regulation and management of the spin-off process. This paper draws on the Italian experience. More than fifty Italian universities issued spin-off regulations between 2001 and 2008. The author looks at the reasons why Italian universities have decided to issue these specific regulations to control the research spin-off phenomenon, assesses the similarities and differences between the regulations of various universities and examines whether and to what extent the regulations are useful.
BaldiniN.GrimaldiR.SobreroM. (2007), ‘Diffusion of organizational practices in turbulent environments: An empirical analysis of university-level patent regulations’, paper presented at the 2007 Academy of Management Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, 3–8 August.
5.
CalinskiT.HarabaszJ. (1974), ‘A dendrite method for cluster analysis’, Communications in Statistics – Simulation and Computation, Vol 3, No 1, pp 1–27.
6.
CallonM.BowkerG. (1994), ‘Is science a public good?’, Fifth Mullins Lecture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 23 March 1993, Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol 19, No 4, pp 395–424.
7.
CyertR.M.MarchJ.G. (1963), The Behavioral Theory of the Firm, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
8.
DasguptaP.DavidP.A. (1994), ‘Toward a new economics of science’, Research Policy, Vol 23, pp 487–521.
9.
DavidP.A. (1985), ‘Clio and the economics of QWERTY’, American Economic Review, Vol 75, No 2, pp 332–337.
10.
DiMaggioP.J.PowellW.W. (1983), ‘The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields’, American Sociological Review, Vol 48, pp 147–160.
11.
FrumkinP.GalaskiewiczJ. (2004), ‘Institutional isomorphism and public sector organizations’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Vol 14, No 3, pp 283–307.
12.
GeunaA. (1996), ‘European universities: An interpretative history’, Research Memoranda, No 008, MERIT, Maastricht.
13.
GeunaA. (1998), ‘The internationalisation of European universities: A return to Medieval roots’, Minerva, Vol 36, pp 253–270.
14.
HannanM.T. (2005), ‘Ecologies of organizations: Diversity and identity’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol 19, No 1, pp 51–70.
15.
HannanM.T.BaronJ.N.HsuG.KocakO. (2006), ‘Organizational identities and the hazard of change’, Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol 15, No 5, pp 755–784.
16.
HannanM.T.FreemanJ. (1977), ‘The population ecology of organizations’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol 82, No 5, pp 929–964.
17.
HannanM.T.FreemanJ. (1984), ‘Structural inertia and organizational change’, American Sociological Review, Vol 49, No 2, pp 149–164.
18.
HannanM.T.FreemanJ. (1989), Organizational Ecology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
19.
HannanM.T.FreemanJ.H. (1986), ‘Where do organizational forms come from?’, Sociological Forum, Vol 1, No 1, pp 50–72.
20.
HannanM.T.PolosL.CarrollG.R. (2004), ‘The evolution of inertia’, Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol 13, No 1, pp 213–242.
21.
HogewegP. (1976), ‘Iterative character weighing in numerical taxonomy’, Computers in Biology and Medicine, Vol 6, No 3, pp 199–211.
22.
MilliganG.W.CooperM.C. (1985), ‘An examination of procedures for determining the number of clusters in a data set’, Psychometrika, Vol 50, No 2, pp 159–179.
23.
NelsonR.R.WinterS.G. (1982), An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
24.
PaulusO. (2008), ‘La déclaration de mission, une revue de la littérature’, Working Paper No 13, Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie, Université de Strasbourg, paper presented at the AIMS conference, Nice, June 2008.
25.
PaulusO. (2009), ‘Impact de la déclaration de mission sur la performance’, work in progress, Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie, Université de Strasbourg.
26.
PfefferJ.SalancikG.R. (1978), The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective, Harper&Row, New York.
