SPIN-UP - Creating an Entrepreneurship Coaching and Training Program for University Spin-Offs

This SPIN-UP project has been funded with support from the European Commission and is a study involving research performed in 4 countries: Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal. The SPIN-UP research question is: What sort of entrepreneurship training and coaching program will contribute to the development of key entrepreneurial skills, both technical and behavioural, essential to enable and leverage university spin-off (USO) growth? The aim of the SPIN-UP study was to picture key entrepreneurial skills and their contribution to the performance of university spin-off firms, as well as missing skills, in order to develop an effective training and coaching program. USO, entrepreneurial firms that bring university knowledge to market, do not traditionally grow very much and we sought to contribute to a countering of this trend. To avoid a large differentiation in firm age, firm age limits were set at 2 years (lower limit) and 10 years (higher limit). 10 years was however used flexibly, particularly in those sectors where development and bringing products to market goes relatively slowly, like in the medical life sciences and material (nano) science (15 years used as the maximum in these cases). The research to date has involved a total of 64 interviews and questionnaires in the four countries mentioned above. The preliminary comparative analysis revealed that the four countries studied show somewhat different skill sets, meaning that we may still be in a World where differences still matter (Ghemawat, 2007). For example, spinoffs in Finland tend to be strong in skills dealing with intellectual property, which is the opposite of Poland, the Netherlands and Portugal. Portugal on the other hand appears to be quite strong in operations management skills as compared to the rest of the sample. The skill set of the Netherlands emphasized strength in skills related to the building of social and business networks, a theme which is very in vogue in the current business and management literature. However, spinoffs in the four countries did show some similarities, tending all to be strong in innovation skills. As concerns future training for USO our research indicates that this should focus on: gaining financial capital, internationalization and sales (top 3 missing skills hampering growth). More practical "hands-on" type entrepreneurship training, such as that using role-playing enriched by the sharing of entrepreneurial participant experiences, may be seen as being appropriate for USO. Work by Ghemawat (2001) (CAGE Model for internationalization) and Cialdini (2007) (principles of persuasion to be used in sales) may serve as a theoretical basis for such training.