Academic Spin-offs team composition: a hypothesis of non-linear relationship between team heterogeneity and growth performance

The main objective of this on-going research project is to explore a non-linear relationship between academic spin-offs’ (ASOs) founding teams’ composition and their performance. A growing body of empirical researches highlights ASOs relatively low performance rate when compared to independent start-ups (Heirman and Clarysse, 2004; Ensley and Hmieleski, 2005), and the composition of the founding team appears as the critical issue (Clarysse and Moray, 2004; Visintin and Pittino, 2014). Albeit a certain degree of functional heterogeneity seems to be desirable, the positive linear relationship between team heterogeneity and performance is controversial and empirical investigations show mixed results (Klotz et al. 2014). Drawing from previous researches on teams’ functional diversity (e.g. Tekleab at al. 2016; Visintin and Pittino, 2014), the study tries to open the black box by offering new exploratory perspectives in the study of the relationship between founding teams’ heterogeneity and growth performance of ASOs.