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Index des auteurs > Ferrary Michel

Ferrary Michel, Orsat Jérémy

Academic entrepreneurship, the creation of a university spin-off (USO) by academic scientists, is a fruitful way to transfer knowledge from academia to industry and to promote innovation. The literature mostly investigates the antecedents and short-term impact of USOs, and there is a lack of research regarding their long-term interaction with their parent universities. Building on the process approach in an inductive perspective, we conducted a longitudinal case study on the knowledge relationship between a deep-tech USO and its parent university. Our findings show that, once the USO was created, it developed a bidirectional knowledge exchange and a long-term, close as well as mutually beneficial relationship with its parent university. This knowledge exchange takes place in an undulatory model of interorganizational ambidexterity where exploration nourishes exploitation, exploitation nourishes exploration, and a shared space of ambidexterity with co-exploration and co-exploitation exists. Through the perspective of organizational ecology, we propose to conceptualize such a knowledge relationship as a university-USO knowledge symbiosis: a permanent, cyclical, proximal, socially embedded and mutually beneficial knowledge relationship between a parent university and its USO.

Ferrary Michel

Building on prominent knowledge management scholars (Grant, 1996; Nonaka, 1994; Simon, 1991) asserting that initially all knowledge is tacit and created by people, we assume that critical knowledge underlying start-up inception is tacit and embodied in its founders. Then, progressively, knowledge is disembodied to be crystallized in more tangible and explicit containers such as patents, technologies or products. This evolution of knowledge tangibility related to start-up maturity makes HR management a strategic issue for acquirers to capture knowledge by retaining founders. Strategic HRM is critical when acquiring young start-ups and justifies sophisticated and specific HR practices to retain the founders (Kristiana et al., 2021). This research builds on a study of 211 start-ups acquired by Google between 2001 and 2018, exploring the relationship between the presence and retention of start-up founders and the business maturity of the start-ups at the time of acquisition by a large firm.