Exploring a non-linear relationship between academic spin-offs’ team heterogeneity and growth performance

Academic Spin-Offs (ASOs) emerge out from universities with the specific purpose to market technologies or researches’ discoveries settled within a scientific domain. Hitherto, the association between team heterogeneity and performance is mainly assessed using linear relationships, offering controversial and mixed results. Based on a new hand-collected database, this work-in-progress study explores and offers argumentations for the occurrence of a non-linear relationship between founding teams’ composition in terms of functional background and subsequent ASOs’ growth performance.