Maria Roche: Professor-led spinouts have poorer outcomes

Should professors be spinout founders? An increasing number of universities are pushing their faculty to be more entrepreneurial but data suggests that that’s not always a good thing — for the professor, the spinout or the students.

Maria Roche, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, examined the funding and exits of hundreds of biotech spinouts and discovered that if the startup’s technology is closely linked to the research in the original lab or the faculty is a founder, the spinout is much less likely to raise significant funding. Having an academic founder also doesn’t improve the odds of being acquired or going public.

For PhD students in the academic founder’s lab, the experience can be miserable because suddenly, this great mind they were hoping to learn from is busy running a startup. That has long-term implications: these students publish fewer studies themselves and are significantly more likely to go into consulting rather than becoming researchers themselves.

Roche is not against spinouts per se but warns that universities don’t seem to be aware of the cost. In this week’s episode of Beyond the Breakthrough, she offers tips on how to mitigate these effects.

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