Summer is always a good time to catch up on research (and also when many academics post working papers). Here are a couple of recent pieces of research that caught our eye in the university entrepreneurship space.

• Valuing University-based Firms by Damiano Bonardo, Stefano Paleari, and Silvio Vismara

How can you best measure the impact of universities in creating high-impact businesses? Patents? Start-ups? Licensing? I don’t have an answer, but I think this research from Europe which looked at firms that went public on the stock markets of Germany, UK, France, and Italy from 1995 to 2002 was a really good effort. They found just over 8% of all non-financial firms going public in this period could trace their emergence to a university. If anyone has seen a similar piece on the U.S., please let us know!

• University Spin-Off’s Transfer Speed – Analyzing the Time from Leaving University to Venture by Kathrin Müller

In studying firms founded between 1996 and 2001 in Germany, these authors found something surprising about academic entrepreneurs. Fifty percent of firms founded by academics who had left a university didn’t establish the company until more than four years after leaving their university positions. We have seen some research on the time lag of declaring an invention to when it is commercialized but this line of research on time lag of the academic entrepreneur from leaving one position to going to the next is new to us.

• Commercializing the Laboratory: Faculty Patenting and the Open Science Environment by Kira Fabrizio and Alberto Di Minin

Contributing to a somewhat confusing literature on the subject, this new piece of published research finds patenting and publishing are complements to each other.