SPIN-UP - creating an Entrepreneurship Coaching and Training Program for University Spin-Offs

Abstract

This SPIN-UP project has been funded with support from the European Commission and is a study involving research performed in 4 countries: Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal. The SPIN-UP research question is: What sort of entrepreneurship training and coaching program will contribute to the development of key entrepreneurial skills, both technical and behavioural, essential to enable and leverage university spin-off (USO) growth? The aim of the SPIN-UP study was to picture key entrepreneurial skills and their contribution to the performance of university spin-off firms, as well as missing skills, in order to develop an effective training and coaching program. USO, entrepreneurial firms that bring university knowledge to market, do not traditionally grow very much and we sought to contribute to a countering of this trend. To avoid a large differentiation in firm age, firm age limits were set at 2 years (lower limit) and 10 years (higher limit). 10 years was however used flexibly, particularly in those sectors where development and bringing products to market goes relatively slowly, like in the medical life sciences and material (nano) science (15 years used as the maximum in these cases). The research to date has involved a total of 64 interviews and questionnaires in the four countries mentioned above. The preliminary comparative analysis revealed that the four countries studied show somewhat different skill sets, meaning that we may still be in a World where diff