A Literature Review and Prospects of University Spin-offs

After nearly 30 years’ exploration from the connotation of university spin-offs to influencing factors and value creation functions, the research on university spin-offs has become an important academic issue. This article firstly uses CiteSpace to carry out the bibliometric analysis of 68 English documents and 17 Chinese documents from the Web of Science database and CNKI, and the time span of the retrieved documents ranges from 1987 to 2019. The bibliometric analysis mainly includes the analysis of statistical characteristics （overall publication trends, core publication journals and representative scholars） and the research hotspots of university spin-off literature. Based on the analysis of research hotspots, the research of university spin-offs can be divided into three parts: connotation and categories of university spin-offs, influencing factors of university spin-offs at different stages, and value creation functions of university spin-offs. Secondly, we comb the research results about the connotation and categories of university spin-offs, and point out that university spin-offs can be understood as enterprises founded by academic entrepreneurs with the support of university incubation mechanism. The establishment of university spin-offs experiences the transformation of technical knowledge from universities into business ideas. According to the internal differences between academic entrepreneurs and parent universities, there are six different ways of dividing university spin-offs. Thirdly, this article summarizes the growth stage models of university spin-offs designed by different scholars. Based on the four-stage model of Vanaelst, et al. （2010）, we propose specific influencing factors that play an important role in the formation and development of university spin-offs, i.e. research commercialization and opportunity screening stage, incubation stage, sustainability proof stage, and maturity stage, and then partly outline the relationship among different influencing factors. Finally, this article summarizes value creation functions of university spin-offs from the perspectives of academic entrepreneurs, universities and regional environment. Through the review of researches, it is found that the connotation of university spin-offs gradually improves with the delineation of three key elements: academic entrepreneurs, technical knowledge, and university incubation mechanism. The latest research begins to emphasize the process of enterprise formation from a dynamic perspective. In the research commercialization and opportunity screening stage and incubation stage, the academic subjects represented by entrepreneurs and universities play a key role in the establishment of university spin-offs. During the stages of survivability proof and maturity, venture investors, governments, and other market and social entities have begun to play a leading role. The positive value creation functions of university spin-offs have been widely recognized, but their internal mechanism is not yet clear. On the whole, there is still huge theoretical innovation space for the discussion of university spin-offs. According to the focus and trends of existing literature, we believe that future research may achieve breakthroughs in four aspects: the influencing factors in different growth stages and their mechanism of action, the evolution of governance mechanism, the internal mechanism of its value creation, and the study of university spin-offs under the Chinese context.