Academic entrepreneurship, the establishment of new companies based on technologies derived from university research, is a well-recognized driver of regional and national economic development. For more than a decade, scholars have conceptualized individual university faculty as the primary agents of academic entrepreneurship. Recent research suggests that graduate students also play a critical role in the establishment and early development of university spinoff companies, but the nature of their involvement through the entrepreneurial process is not yet fully understood. Employing a case study approach, this paper investigates the role of graduate students in early-stage university spinoff companies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We find that graduate students play role similar to that of individual faculty entrepreneurs in university spinoffs, both in terms of making the initial establishment decision and in reconfiguring the organization for marketable technology development. We also find that student entrepreneurs face unique challenges involving conflicts with faculty advisors and other students.

This paper empirically examines the evaluations of 537 ventures in high-growth industries performed by 251 experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and executives. These experts evaluated ventures by reading succinct summaries of the ventures without meeting the founding teams, and their evaluations were not disclosed to the entrepreneurs. We find that experts can differentiate among early-stage ventures on grounds of quality beyond the explicit venture and entrepreneur characteristics contained in the written summaries. They can only do so effectively, however, for ventures in the hardware, energy, life sciences, and medical devices sectors; they cannot do so for ventures in the consumer products, consumer web and mobile, and enterprise software sectors. Our results highlight sector-specific heterogeneity in the information needed to effectively screen ventures, a finding that has implications for the design of optimal investment strategies. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

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