Open innovation: How academic spin-off firms match incoming knowledge with knowledge gaps on critical resources

Many academic spin-off firms experience resource deficiencies that slow down their growth. In this paper, we investigate the critical resources that are missing and knowledge retrieved from networks to solve or prevent missing resources, to better understand the causes of slow growth. In a sample of 105 spin-offs from Norway and the Netherlands, it is found that spin-off firms most frequently lack three types of resources: marketing skills, management skills and (knowledge on) financial capital. High severity in terms of duration is observed for marketing and managerial resources compared to financial capital. We also observe a trend that knowledge retrieving through the network happens in a somewhat unstructured and chaotic manner. However, the matching between lack of financial resources and retrieving knowledge on these resources tends to be effective, as is witnessed by a positive influence on employment growth of the spin-off firms.