Abstract

In the last decade, there has been growing attention of the institutions towards the third mission of Universities. The university, along with their two fundamental goals of education and research, pursues a 'third mission', which means that it works to encourage the direct application, enhancement and use of learning to contribute to society's social, cultural and economic development. An instrument to pursue this mission is the creation by universities of academic spin-offs (ASOs) transferring the research results to the business world. This paper tested how the external environment would affect or not the performances of ASOs and in what terms. The dependent variable that best expresses growth, according to the academia, is the sales and the elements of the external environment. It wanted to test if the presence or not, in the province where the ASOs is located, of technology parks, business accelerators and incubators are influential. In this paper, it conducted a cross sectional analysis using an OLS examining the financial statements (31/12/2014) of 552 Italian ASOs.

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