Portuguese scientist wins international award for best doctoral thesis in entrepreneurship

The Heizer Doctoral Dissertation Award in New Enterprise Development, from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management ( based in New York, USA), is awarded for outstanding doctoral research in the areas of creation, management, growth, and development of high-potential new ventures, venture capital, or corporate entrepreneurship. In the 2015 edition, among three finalists, the thesis by Sérgio Costa, a researcher at INESC TEC, was chosen as the winner. Awarded by the University of Strathclyde (United Kingdom) and entitled "Business Model Change in Early-Stage University Spin-offs,"the thesis thus became the best of 2015 in the field 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 unfolds; 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 conclusions of the thesis 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 market.

The approach to the topic was also unprecedented. Instead of the traditional method, which is based on obtaining a "snapshot" of the universe being studied at a given moment, Sérgio resorted to a longitudinal and in-depth analysis of eight companies spin-offs from the University of Strathclyde. He followed these companies for 12 months, collecting data from documents and interviews to understand the mechanisms of change in the business model and how they affect the performance of companies.

The results suggest that companies whose founding teams have greater management and market knowledge and extensive experience in entrepreneurship generally make fewer changes to their business model and perform better. The same is true for companies that focus on more specialized areas of technology and business.

The study also shows that high-performing companies tend to interact earlier, even before their incorporation, 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 has become an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) at the School of Management at the University of Bath (United Kingdom). He maintains his position as Visiting Researcher at Ghent University (Belgium) and his collaboration with INESC TEC. He intends to continue the work he began in his PhD, as he explains, “We now want to test some of the propositions put forward in the thesis, using larger samples of spin-offs from different universities and geographical areas. To this end, INESC TEC is developing a database 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 received a Studentship from FCT, partially for three years, and fully in the fourth and final year. INESC TEC was one of the centers classified as "Excellent" in the latest evaluation of national R&D units carried out by FCT.

(Image credits: Sérgio Costa)