A Review and Prospects of Foreign Literature on Spin-off

Abstract

Spin-off refers to the process of forming new ventures（spinoffs）from existing organizations（parent companies）. Spin-off, as a special way to set up new ventures, is an effective way for employees to seek self-realization and an important means for enterprises to implement strategic change, and also plays an indispensably important role for industrial clusters and regional economic development. Foreign scholars have carried out a lot of researches on spin-off, however, the amount of domestic research done on this topic is rather limited, not receiving enough attention. Through the review of related literature, this paper firstly reviews the definition, types and processes of spin-off, emphatically combs the theoretical basis, and summarizes the influencing factors of spinoff performance for a further step. Specifically speaking, foreign scholars have basically agreed on the concept and characteristics of spin-off. Previous studies have mainly classified spin-off as academic spin-off, corporate spin-off and entrepreneurial spin-off, but they often equate and mix corporate spin-off and entrepreneurial spin-off. And with regard to spin-off process researches, the process of entrepreneurial spin-off has been neglected. Secondly, we find that spin-off research is mainly based on four different perspectives, including resource-based view, knowledge-based view, agency perspective and transaction cost perspective. Thirdly, the factors affecting the performance of spinoffs mainly include the characteristics of the participants（founders or founding teams, spinoffs, parent companies）and the external environment. For different types of fission, the influencing factors are also different. Finally, this paper points out the directions in future research based on the limitations of current spin-off researches, including distinguishing different types of spin-off and focusing on entrepreneurial spin-off, developing expansionary research on the concept and types of spin-off in the Chinese context, exploring the mechanism of spin-off process deeply, analyzing the influencing mechanism of spin-off through the fusion of multiple perspectives, and studying on the multi-level integration of the influencing factors of spin-off.