Creating Spin-Offs (or Spin-Outs) from universities and research centers is quite easy. You fill some forms, you get the formal approval from your department, and then you create the limited liability company. That’s it.
Many governments are nowadays focused on promoting startup creation among scientists and then (tentatively) support them with different tools.
In terms of University mission (that can be summarized in “create and diffuse knowledge”), creating businesses with startups potential is without any doubt the modality that can maximize the potential of knowledge diffusion and impact on society.
To better comprehend why, let’s start from the definition of Startup:
<aside> 💡 A startup is a (temporary) organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business mode - Steve Blank
</aside>
The most important part of the definition is the part related to the scalability of the business model. Scalability refers to the ability of a business to grown and expand in a cost effective and efficient way.
Nowadays, however the term Startup is misused: it is in fact frequently associated with any kind of company in the first stages of operations.
<aside> ⚠️
All startups are companies “in the first stages of operations”, but not all “companies in the first stages of operations” are startups.
</aside>
Understanding whether the idea of the company that you have in mind has a “startup potential” is therefore the first step in the your entrepreneurial journey, and will avoid making you look unprofessional in front of investors (as suggested in this post on I Want Product-Market Fit by Jeroen Coelen)
<aside> ⚠️ Warning!!! Before continuing the post, I need to make a clarification. As you might have noticed from the header meme, I’m trying to be a little bit critical regarding the startup culture. Since I feel that there is still a lot of confusion, the goal of this post (as of all the blog) is to raise awareness of people involved in science regarding different typologies of entrepreneurial activities, limitations of each model and relative trade-offs to provide them better tools to evaluate whether to engage in entrepreneurial activities.
</aside>
Now that I warned you, we can go on.
Even if entrepreneurs can be defined as “people who solve other people’s problems”, the way in which problems are solved and the typology of problem to solve will determine the typology of your venture.
Three strictly interrelated elements must be taken into account to evaluate what kind of company you can launch (and potentially save you from stomach ache):
Let’s break down all the elements before exploring how they map into different typologies of ventures.