Portuguese scientist wins international prize for best doctoral thesis in entrepreneurship

The award Heizer Doctoral Dissertation Award in New Enterprise Developmentfrom the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management (based in New York, USA), is awarded to exceptional doctoral research carried out in the areas of creation, management, growth and development of new high-potential initiatives, venture capital or corporate entrepreneurship. In the 2015 edition, out of three finalists, the thesis by Sérgio Costa, a researcher at INESC TEC, was chosen as the winner. Awarded by the University of Strathclyde (UK) and entitled "Business Model Change in Early-Stage University Spin-offs", the thesis became the best of 2015 in the area of entrepreneurship and management.

The award-winning work investigated the evolution, over time, of the business models adopted by university spin-offs, namely how the evolutionary process takes place; how changes in the business model affect the company's performance; how specific components of a business model interact with each other over time. The thesis' conclusions are relevant for entrepreneurs, but also for universities, policy-makers, educators and trainers, as well as for business development managers and executives who want to bring new products or services to the market.

The approach to the subject was also unprecedented. Instead of the traditional method, which is based on taking a "snapshot" of the universe to be studied at a particular moment in time, Sérgio used a longitudinal, in-depth analysis of eight companies spin-off from the University of Strathclyde. He followed these companies for 12 months, collecting data from documents and interviews, in order to understand the mechanisms of change in the business model and how these affect the companies' performance.

The results suggest that companies whose founding teams have greater management and market knowledge, and are highly experienced in entrepreneurship, generally have fewer changes to the business model and higher performance. The same is true for companies dedicated to more focused technological and business areas.

The study also shows that high-performance companies tend to interact earlier, even before they are set up, and more intensively with stakeholders to test their business models. These companies tend to establish more partnerships, with a broader spectrum of actors (private and public), which may explain why they experience fewer difficulties in accessing resources.

Sérgio Costa became aLecturer at the School of Management at the University of Bath (UK). He maintains his position as Guest Researcher at the University of Ghent (Belgium) and his collaboration with INESC TEC. He intends to continue the work started in his PhD, as he explains, "We now want to test some of the propositions induced in the thesis, using larger samples of spin-offs from different universities and geographies. To this end, INESC TEC is developing a database with the population of all Portuguese university spin-offs, in conjunction with existing databases in Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom."

Sérgio Costa completed his thesis in November 2014, under the supervision of Jonathan Levie (University of Strathclyde) and Marina Biniari (Aalto University, Finland). He was awarded an FCT Doctoral Studentship , partially for three years, and fully in the fourth and final year. INESC TEC was one of the centers classified as "Excellent" in the last evaluation of national R&D Units carried out by FCT.

(Image credit: Sérgio Costa)