The key activities undertaken to date have focused on the analysis of the core database created in the project.
The analysis of the micro-level database brought several main policy-relevant findings. First, the analysis finds that innovative firms whose founders have a research degree tend to specialize in selected high-tech industries such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence. The evidence also suggests that founders with higher levels of education receive higher funding amounts, a higher number of deals, and have a lower probability of ceasing operations than those with an undergraduate degree.
Second, the results show that research institutions play an important albeit heterogeneous, role in the success of innovative start-ups. Third, the results provide evidence of the importance of “knowledge districts” between public research institutions and firms. More than half of innovative start-ups analysed in this report are located within 1 km of a public research institution.
The analysis of GovVCs brought two main policy relevant findings. First, assessing the role of GovVCs in promoting the transfer of knowledge from the lab to the market, the report finds that GovVCs tend to disproportionately support new technology-based firms (NTBFs) with close ties to academic research. Compared to private VCs, GovVCs are more likely to provide financing to firms whose founders have a research degree (PhDs), to firms whose innovations are more closely grounded in the academic literature, and to firms specializing in fields and technologies that have closer links to academia, such as healthcare and biotechnology. Interestingly, within firms founded by PhD holders, those who also own patents are less likely to receive funding from GovVCs, suggesting that public VCs give priority to early-stage academic start-ups compared to firms at later stage of product development. Second, comparing the financial and innovative outcomes of firms receiving GVC versus those receiving private VC support, the report finds that firms supported by GVC tend to raise lower amounts of VC, are less likely to have a successful exit, and do not differ in the number of patents applied for. While these findings corroborate those reported in previous studies, they do not necessarily imply that GVC is an inefficient tool to help support NTBFs as these differences in performance could well be explained by differences in the characteristics of start-ups selected by GVC and private VC. Indeed, an important contribution of this analysis is to show that non-academic firms drive these differences. When focusing on firms with stronger ties with academia, the results show that academic firms supported by GVC perform as well as academic firms backed by private VC in terms of financial measures, and produce patents of higher quality. This suggests that GVC funding may be more effective when targeted at NTBFs with closer ties to academic research.
A presentation of these findings was shared with delegates of the OECD’s Committee on Industry, Innovation and Entrepreneurship during the CIIE November 2020 meeting as well as a joint European Commission-OECD innovation seminar.
