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This paper focuses on venture team characteristics with respect to human capital dimensions in early stage ventures emerging from academic research (institutions). Three major groups have been investigated: founders, top managers and directors. Data was obtained using personal interviews with 185 product-oriented academic spin-offs in nine European countries, including those of 17 failures. The results show a significant positive-but diminishing-impact of team heterogeneity on venture success, as well as a positive impact from legal expertise within the board of directors. At management level, the results further indicate that larger management team are better equipped to face the challenges in academic spin-offs. Furthermore, the added value of serial entrepreneurs is questioned, since they seem to negatively impact a spin-off's survival chances. Several implications are addressed, dealing with an appropriate team composition (on the levels of both top management and the board of directors) as well as the importance of paying attention to team development.

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The research domain of innovation and entrepreneurship is relatively young and fragmented. Therefore, no consensus exists on the definition of the main concepts. This paper intends to both elucidate (the differences between) the concepts of 'spinoff' and 'spin-out' and, starting from existing literature typologies, to integrate several existing spin-off taxonomies, classifications and typologies in order to create a clear and complete framework for further research. This way, 10 different 'ideal' spin-off and spin-out types will be defined. The resulting integrated typology will be illustrated in view of its practical and theoretical implications.