Title: Financial performance analysis of spin-off companies from a UK 'regional' university: a case study of the University of Birmingham

Authors: Peter Jelfs

Addresses: Department of Management, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet St., London WC1E 7HX, UK

Abstract: University spin-off companies (USOs) have become a significant feature of the UK's further education landscape over the last 20 years. Given the large number of UK USOs created over recent years, studies of their financial performance would appear, on first principles, to be vital to carry out to assess whether the USO is the optimum method of university IPR exploitation. There is however, a significant gap in the literature on the studies of financial performance of UK USOs. The key additions to the literature on USOs from this case study will be the technique of the construction of a rigorous data set of USOs for a university using a variety of publicly available independent sources, and to investigate key performance measures such as survival history of the USOs and amounts of money raised from third parties by USOs, measures that are particularly under-represented in the analyses to date.

Keywords: university spin-offs; financial performance; redbrick universities; higher education; UK; United Kingdom; University of Birmingham; UoB; survival history; regional universities; case study; IPR exploitation; intellectual property rights; patents; key performance indicators; KPIs; third party funding.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2016.078697

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2016 Vol.29 No.2, pp.271 - 286

Received: 05 Feb 2015
Accepted: 24 Sep 2015
Published online: 01 Sep 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article