Laura Toschi

Assessing the impact of public venture capital programmes in the United Kingdom: Do regional characteristics matter?

Over the last two decades, many governments around the world have implemented programs to mobilize venture capital (VC) in support of new and innovative firms. In this paper, we analyze whether and how the impact of publicly-supported VC funds varies between high-tech and low-tech regions, when compared to private VC funds. Our analyses on a sample of 898 VC-backed companies in the United Kingdom in the period 1998-2007 show for public VC funds: (a) a greater propensity to invest in early-stage and technology-based sectors, which is especially pronounced in low-tech regions; (b) a greater propensity toward staging and a greater ability to attract partners in syndication, especially in high-tech regions; (c) lower exit rates of investee companies, in terms of IPO/acquisition, as compared to private VC funds. Overall, our findings confirm that regional characteristics do matter if we want to more rigorously assess the effectiveness of public VC programs.

Academic logic and corporate entrepreneurial intentions: A study of the interaction between cognitive and institutional factors in new firms

This article studies the extent to which corporate entrepreneurial intentions are enacted differently by academic and non-academic entrepreneurs. Using constructs from cognitive research and exploiting the theory of institutional logics, we observe that academic entrepreneurs, notwithstanding their engagement in entrepreneurship, still implement their corporate entrepreneurial intentions acting in accordance with the academic institutional environment to which they belong. Using a matched-pairs research design, our results show that academic entrepreneurs (compared to non-academic ones) leverage their awareness of technical competencies significantly more and their entrepreneurial self-efficacy and awareness of managerial skills considerably less. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications related to how cognitive and institutional factors interact to foster entrepreneurial value in newly established firms.

Financing technology transfer: assessment of university-oriented proof-of-concept programmes

ABSTRACT This study analyses the characteristics of the proof-of-concept (POC) programmes initiated by university and public research organisations in Europe, as a mechanism to address funding gaps and improve the transfer of research-based inventions to markets. We contribute to the literature on investment readiness of new ventures and on financing technology transfer by assessing the structure of such funding instruments and identifying critical success factors for their design and implementation. The analyses rely on seven in-depth case studies of university-oriented POCs in Europe.

Patent-backed Finance

The Economic Valuation of Patents provides an original and essential analysis of patent valuation, presenting the main methodologies to value patents in different contexts.

The Intersection Between Capacity Building and Finance

New ventures do not have access to the same financial resources as larger firms, for the presence of the so-called “funding gap”. Such a barrier can be particularly pronounced for university startups, given their knowledge- and technology-based nature. To address this market failure, universities (often in collaboration with public and/or private partners) have started to activate programs to support their startups. By presenting a set of best practices and case studies, the chapter describes three main areas of intervention in the area of capacity building for accessing finance: (i) raising awareness and competences to access external finance (i.e. training activities and commercialization bootcamps), (ii) supporting the validation and maturation of university technologies (i.e. proof-of-concept programmes and university accelerator programmes) and (iii) enhancing interactions and building partnership with investors (i.e. matchmaking events with investors, networks of different types of investors, formalized partnerships between universities and financial investors, and university seed funds).

Collaborative Practices and Multidisciplinary Research: The Dialogue between Entrepreneurship, Management and Data Science

Digital technologies and their applications are systematically altering established practices and making new ones emerge in different realms of society. Research in social sciences in general and management in particular is no exception, and several examples that span a variety of fields are coming into the spotlight not only from scholarly communities but also the popular press. To join this conversation, in this chapter we focus on how management and entrepreneurship research can benefit from ICT technologies and data science protocols. First, we discuss recent trends in management and data science research to identify some commonalities. Second, we combine both perspectives and present some evidence arising from different collaborative projects addressing: university-industry collaborations, the impact of technology-based activities, the measurement of scientific productivity, as well as performance measurement and business analytics. Implications for collaborative practices in entrepreneurship research are discussed.

From The Lab To The Stock Market? An Analysis Of University-Oriented Seed Funds In Europe

This work investigates the role of university and PRO-oriented seed funds (i.e. USFs), namely VC funds with an explicit mission to make investments in academic spin-offs, as instruments to address ...

L’impatto dei programmi pubblici a supporto del venture capital: il caso del Regno Unito

The paper assesses the impact of the publicly-backed funds created to enable new and high-tech companies to obtain VC (venture capital) to meet their funding requirements. It describes the main approaches used to perform an evaluation of this type and an application related to the experience of the United Kingdom. The analyses are based on a sample of six hundred and fifty companies financed by public and private VC funds in the United Kingdom in the 1998-2007 period.

The Search of Complementarity in Explorative Strategies: The Relationship between Corporate Venture Capital Investments and Corporate Diversification

This paper uses data on 221 Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) funds created by 186 U.S. public firms during the period 1996–2006 to examine the presence of complementarity/substitution between corporate diversification and CVC fund diversification as different forms of exploration. Our results suggest that corporations undertake CVC investments to substitute corporate diversification if the focus is to explore new markets, and complement corporate diversification in the search of new technological domains. We also find that these relationships are sensitive to industry-specific factors: in high-tech sectors the substitution effect for the market side vanishes and the technological complementary effect is amplified.