Knowledge Accumulation and Reuse for Spinning off Firms from Learning Organizations

Abstract

The past years have seen a remarkable increase in knowledge based start-ups. In Europe, as in the USA, the debate over the role of universities and firms as knowledge clusters and as sources of new spin-off companies has intensified since the publication of recent reports. Giving the inadequacy of the classic patterns to exploit and transfer many knowledge assets, our study looked at the spin off processes from learning organizations as a way to transfer them for stimulating new entrepreneurship (i.e., in a perspective of reusing the knowledge previously accumulated). The authors’ research showed that academic and corporate spin offs are differently influenced by the knowledge accumulated in the contexts of origin. The authors also discuss some managerial implications of the proposed model.