Spin offs universitárias de sucesso: um estudo multicasos de empresas originárias da Escola Politécnica da USP e da COPPE da UFRJ

Abstract

Academic spin offs are companies funded by entrepreneurs from a knowledge asset created in a university, in order to transform that knowledge in products and services. It is an alternative of technology transfer from the university to society. University spin-offs are object of interest of many actors because of their potential impacts on regions, countries, competitiveness, entrepreneurial culture, diffusion of innovations, generation of qualified jobs and income. “What factors influence the success of Brazilian spin off companies?” That was the guide question to this research. The methodology was qualitative; through a multi-case study of eight spin off successful companies. The eight cases were generated from the knowledge produced in two academic engineering institutions: the Escola Politecnica of the University of Sao Paulo and COPPE of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. We carried out 25 interviews with entrepreneurs and actors of the universities, complemented by the collection and analysis of public data. The conceptual model was developed from the literature review, it is multilevel and composed of six layers: the national context; the regional context; the university; the academic institution; the laboratory and the spin-off company. The main conclusions were that all factors affect the success of companies. In the national context, the Brazilian regulatory framework supports the generation and development of spin-offs, despite having ambiguities, being new and still incomplete. The national federal institutions have credit lines that are accessed by the companies. In the regional context, the analysis confirms the importance of the regional conditions that affected the development of the firms. These firms accessed credit lines, innovative customers, suppliers and investors networks of the regions. Whereas in the literature the conclusion of regional conditions were more important than national conditions, it was not confirmed in this research, perhaps this is one of the peculiarities of the Brazilian case. Regarding universities, despite both count on their support organizations such as the Technology Transfer Offices, incubators and science parks, they do not have clear policies and actions to support the academic entrepreneurship and the regulatory environments are incomplete. Similar unclear actions and regulatory incompleteness were observed in both academic institutions in one of them actions and policies are more developed. Both have intense relationship with companies and their academic and research activities achieve high standards, the same characteristics were observed in the laboratories. Regarding the spin off companies, 50% had their spontaneous genesis, in 37.5% the entrepreneurial teams were mixed, consisting of researchers and experienced professionals and 62.5% were born global. Some contributions of the study were the need to: remove the ambiguities and complement federal, regional and university regulatory environments; create programs to support the academic entrepreneurship in academic institutions; know, recognize and cultivate spin offs success stories by the university actors; and strengthen the technology transfer offices in the universities so that they can properly carry out their missions.