Portuguese scientist wins international award for best PhD 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 outstanding doctoral research conducted in the areas of creation, management, growth and development of new high-potential initiatives, venture capital or corporate entrepreneurship. In the 2015 edition, among three finalists, the thesis of 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 awarded work investigated the evolution over time of business models adopted by university spin-offs, namely how the evolution 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 findings 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 intend to bring new products or services to market.

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

The results suggest that firms whose founding teams have greater management and market knowledge, and have a high level of entrepreneurial experience show, in general, fewer changes to the business model and superior performance. The same is true for firms in more focused technological and business areas.

The study also shows that high performing firms tend to interact earlier, even before they are formed, 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 Assistant Professor(Lecturer) at the School of Management of 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 articulation with existing databases in Italy, Norway and the UK."

Sérgio Costa completed his thesis in November 2014, under the guidance of Jonathan Levie (University of Strathclyde) and Marina Biniari (Aalto University, Finland). He relied on an FCT PhD 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 FCT evaluation of national R&D Units.

(Credits: Sérgio Costa)