Network prominence and innovation: An empirical analysis of corporate-backed biotech spin-offs

With increasing dynamics and complexity in the biotechnology industry, pharmaceutical companies are forced to broaden the scope of their R&D operations, increasingly relying on external sources of new knowledge. In this context, corporate venturing emerges as an interesting means to exploit new entrepreneurial sources of innovation. By investing in academic spin-offs, and thereby establishing relationships with academic R&D actors, knowledge dispersed in scientific and academic networks can be accessed by the pharmaceutical companies. In this way, equity investments in academic spin-offs present a potential to improve the investors’ innovation performance. Based on a study of 97 corporate-backed academic spin-offs in the biotech field, this paper investigates how structural characteristics of these spin-offs’ R&D networks influence the innovativeness of big pharmaceutical companies that provide venture capital to the spin-offs. In particular, the effect of a spin-off’s prominence in its knowledge network is analyzed, using different network centrality measures. The results obtained show that investments in academic spin-offs holding prominent positions in their R&D networks significantly contribute to the innovativeness of their investors, in terms of the number of patents resulting from these collaborations.