The regional impact of spin-offs’ innovative activity: unveiling the effect of scientific knowledge and parent university’s specialization

Both the managerial literature and policymakers have recently emphasized the potential role of university spin-offs (USOs) as drivers of regional development. Specifically, USOs may support regional development by exploiting the scientific knowledge developed by their parent universities into industrial innovations, thus spreading knowledge spillovers that can be in turn exploited by other local firms. In this paper, we analyse how the use of these spillovers at the regional level may depend on the USOs' capabilities to implement scientific knowledge into their innovation development as well as to align this knowledge to the needs of local organizations. We discuss how these capabilities may be more easily developed by USOs of generalist universities that focus their scientific effort on a broader range of scientific domains and tend to establish stronger relationships with local firms. To test our hypotheses, we analyse data on the patents filed by a large sample of German and Italian USOs. Our results confirm that both a larger use of scientific knowledge and a higher generality of the parent university increase the regional impact of the USOs' inventions. These findings may shed further light on the actual contribution of USOs to the regional development, by providing a better understanding of their role in the transfer of scientific knowledge from the parent universities to the other actors operating in the regional environment.