Presentation Overview

Inventor involvement in the success of university-based startups has been a longstanding debate concerning its effectiveness. Proponents argue that inventor involvement increases the knowledge transfer to exploit new-to-the-world technologies. On the other hand, opponents point out that inventors' lack of business experience distracts the success of the startups. Conventionally, research streams focusing on the impact of inventor involvement have only evaluated success as a single outcome. However, new firms evolve through some milestone events that may occur prior to the success. We identify three key financially related milestones in the growth of any firm: reception of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding, venture capital funding and first sales by product launch. Each of these events impacts a firm's growth trajectory. We aim to reconcile two contradicting views of inventor involvement using a growth view of startups. The present study is based on the University of California Startup Dataset, which includes the entire population of startups based upon on University of California licensed technology after the year 2000. The impact of inventor involvement on the success of university-based startup (firm survival and exit) is explored. The results show that receipt of SBIR funding and first sales by product launch mediate the impact of inventor involvement on the survival rate of startups. In other words, having a greater proportion of the inventor involvement as founders of a startup firm increases the likelihood of receiving SBIR funding and launching a product, which in turn increases the likelihood of survival. However, this effect is only observed for biomedical startups. No mediation effect was found for firm exit; however, the results provide weak evidence that SBIR funding is the important intermediate step for explaining the impact of inventor involvement on the exit of startups.