The effect of organizational identity over the final performance of university spin-offs

USOs is defined as a new company founded to exploit a piece of IP created in an academic institution, which is established by current or former members of a university. Thus, USOs are a subset of all start-up companies created by the students and employees of academic institutions. As the debate over this matter continues, some scholars define USOs as a system transferring IP from a university to a new organization entity, while others have argued that USOs can be established in relation to a research and knowledge transfer. Nevertheless, the definition of USOs continues to change and evolve over time by different researchers and an agreement over this topic among the scholars seems not to be existent. USOs benefit universities and academic institutions, through translating scientific findings into a body of knowledge that can be absorbed and/or acquired by the market. At the same time, businessmen and other external stakeholders also benefit from this knowledge transfer. The review of related literature proposes that the existing challenges in USOs lies within the existence of two totally diverse contexts; academia and/or research intensive vs. business industry. The academic environment has individuals with high educational background who have minimal or no experience in business. While in business context there are entrepreneurs, business angels and other businessmen running their own business and they have their own knowledge coming from the market but not from the academic places such as university or research labs. These differences create some heterogeneous properties. USOs may control or moderate this heterogeneity or diversity using different mechanisms in order to prevent possible performance deficiencies during the growth and development process. These difficulties are interrelated with issues concerning the transfer of final outcomes from the academic environment to the business context. The main aim of this research is trying to find out a mechanism through which the managers of the university spin-offs become able to moderate the heterogeneity and at a same time to enhance the effectiveness of the USOs final performance. The researcher's main objective is about considering the organizational identity and to measure the effectiveness of this concept over the final performance of USOs through the analysis with managers of three different university spin-offs in Emilia Romagna.