How does the interaction with parent university affect USO's exploration and exploitaton? A case-study in the robotic industry

Literature on university spin-offs (USOs) often focuses only on their birth and how this process can be fostered by parent universities and incubators. Conversely, USOs’ growth stage and the role played in this process by external organizations have been rarely investigated in literature. In this paper we partially fill this research gap by analysing the relationships established by USOs in the growth stage with different actors, such as parent universities and accelerators. Specifically, we evaluate how these relationships may influence both USO’s exploration and exploitation, thus providing a significant contribution to their long-run competitive advantage. We conducted a casestudy on a USO operating in the robotics sector that relies on a research team for the core technology development, and on an accelerator for commercial and legal services. We showed how this USO entails a manifest-interactive pattern in which collaboration with the parent research team may affect not only the first stages of exploration and exploitation, but also the USO’s long-run exploration. In this sense, the contribution provided by the accelerator is not limited only to the exploitation of the ideas initially developed by the USO, but also to the management of its long-run exploration path. To provide a systematic framework of the dynamic relationship between USO, parent university and accelerator, we apply the model proposed by Raisch et al. (2016) for corporate spin-offs. We extended this model to show how USOs, differently from corporate spin-offs, may be characterized by more structured growth processes, based on complex relationships with external actors and several exploration-exploitation cycles. The present paper may provide a better understanding of the USOs' growth process, clarifying the potential role of parent universities and accelerators. Besides, this paper may support USOs managers to set up effective long-run relationships with their parent research team, without losing their business focus.