Do academic spinoffs internationalize?

Universities are key actors within the entrepreneurial ecosystems. A positive spillover of their knowledge creation and dissemination activity is the establishment of academic spinoffs. This study is one of the first to investigate the post-entry internationalization of academic spinoffs in terms of international sales. Adopting a conditional difference-in-differences approach, we matched a sample of 508 Italian academic spinoffs established between 1999 and 2014 with 404 comparable non-academic innovative start-ups. We find that university spinoffs are more prone to internationalize than their non-academic counterparts. This result is intrinsic to their affiliation with universities but is also related to the degree of internationalization of the parent university. A two-stage Heckman procedure confirms indeed that university internationalization translates into the internationalization of their spinoffs. This study contributes to different streams of literature, ranging from entrepreneurial ecosystems to academic entrepreneurship and internationalization literature due to the academic spinoffs’ nature of being a phenomenon at the confluence of several research fields.